Raptor Leftovers

Every now and then a hike gets you a glimpse of something wild and interesting. In some areas maybe you get to encounter a large mammal—a bear, maybe a panther or bobcat. Sometimes you just get really cool animal interactions like the time we watched a bald eagle steal a fish from an osprey on the last day of our Florida Trail thru-hike.

Occasionally you come across the weirder but still interesting animal presence such as this dead opossum we found on a hike at Huntsville State Park over the weekend. Since we travel at a 5.5 year old’s pace these days we had been stopping and slowing down, and then speeding up, and looking up and then looking down—and it just so happened we’d paused for a few moments and looked up at this dead tree with a limb hanging across the path and found the leftovers from a raptor’s dinner the previous night. Poor thing didn’t know what was coming when it went out to scavenge!