'Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,' watching the birds of prey

The Otis Redding song, "Sitting on the Cock of the Bay," was great but only now do I understand the lyrics.
Since moving to the bay, I go to my dock whenever I take a break from the studio. I used to watch the wildlife on the bayou when we had Bayou Arts and Antiques but there is a marked difference from a bayou slew and the bay.  
I can now actually watch how the water prey birds go after their meals. I have almost made a study of an attack on the unsuspecting fish. Most of the larger winged divers go after mullet, small trout, and schools of Menhaden. For you visitors, Menhaden are like large minnows. Mullet can range in weight from ounces to an average of two to five pounds. 
The eagles that I have seen are to a lot of folks difficult to distinguish from the osprey. Just remember the eagle has a brown breast while the osprey sports all white feathers. Also, the eagle looks like a B-29 Bomber coming overhead and the osprey a good bit smaller.
One of my daughters worries about bringing her small Winnie dog to the house at times - the open backyard makes it a tasty target for large raptors.
What is neat is how the eagle and the osprey differ in the way they catch fish. Both of course swoop down (average speed is 30 mph but attack dives have been recorded up to 80 mph) with raking talons and stick them deep into the surface fish. Sometimes they immediately drive their beaks into the fish's head while grabbing the fish to further stun it.
The enormous eagle cares not the size of the fish and plucks it out of the water and normally flies away with it sideways to its body. The osprey, being smaller, has problems with that assault method. Once ensnarled in the osprey talons, most of the time the bird finds that the fish is too large, and here he uses his aerodynamics instinct. Nine out of ten times, the osprey turns the fish so it is pointing straight ahead, thus eliminating drag during flight.
I love to watch them set the fish  (in a split second) so they can lift off the water and then soar. The doomed fish looks like a silver torpedo under its fuselage. 
While the Pelican can dive and scoop up a fish, I have found, after watching hours on end, they really use a method that is more efficient and less demanding on the open beak. The pelican spots a fish and literally dives on it hitting the water at maybe 20 to 30 miles an hour. That dive is right at the surface of a large fish or a cluster of fish. The impact of the strike stuns and disorients the fish and with a zooming scoop it finds itself in the beak pouch. A flying Kamikaze dive of a 10-pound pelican hitting a half-pound mullet drives home the point. They also make short dive bursts of no more than 20 or 30 feet apart.
I once noted a crash dive that hit a trout or mullet so hard that at first I thought the fish escaped. Then it came to the surface swimming sideways in a tight circle. The water bird knew he hit it because he waited a few minutes for it to surface then swam over to gulped it down.
The little Kingfish flutters like a hummingbird then dives and grabs the smaller bait fish with pinpoint accuracy. I can never figure out how that pin sharp beak hits that small fish.
Somewhere I recall reading that a water bird will hit the target about once or twice out of ten dives depending upon if it's attacking a school or a lone fish. Maybe that's my weight problem. My fork hits the target every time.
Fair winds to ye matety.
 
Chick Huettel is a long-time Walton County resident and former owner of Bayou Antiques. He is a member of a number of local organizations including the Emerald Coast Archeological Society.