Chiffchaff and Whirligig beetles

[johnpw]

I thought the Chiffchaffs feeding on my pond were catching flies but it turns out they are also eating Whirligig beetles. Perhaps this is well known. Hopefully I'll be able to improve on the image. Regards, John

[Tursiops2]

Nice one! Never heard of that before. Just goes to show, ponds are not just good for frogs
T2

[aeshna5]

Excellent + interesting observation/photo. It's possibly a new observation + may be worth sending a note with this photo to British Birds magazine who have a monthly digest of unusual bird behaviour- I've certainly never heard of this before!

[Wild-Woman]

That's quite remarkable! It's a fairly risky thing to do I should think if it misjudged and ended up with a dunking. Can't say I've ever seen behaviour like this.

[johnpw]

Thanks a lot for the feedback. I couldn't find any reference to Chiffchaffs doing this so I might send something in to the British Birds magazine as suggested if no one else pops up to say that it has been observed before. Shame there is no sun to try to get a better image of it.

[Fourwings]

An excellent observation and well done for catching it on camera.
I have never seen anything like this personally, thing only thing similar was seeing Black-tailed Skimmers picking pond-skaters of the surface of the water whilst in-flight, but that was far too fast to capture on camera!