Now that I'm back for a bit, visiting Mum, I've been going to the park as often as possible because it's quite possibly my favourite place in the world. The lizards are part of the reason why. Their lazy bodies that rock side to side as they swim, their perky little dinosaur faces that also, somehow, remind me of cats. Just watching them is tremendously soothing.
Anyway, I was walking around the lake with a friend when I saw a small gathering of people watching something on the grass. We ambled over to take a look, and there was an ENORMOUS water monitor worrying at a dead catfish almost as long as itself.
A bunch of crows (thirteen of them, in fact) were hopping about, hoping to get a bite of the fish, and Lizard wasn't having that. It maneuvered its jaw to the fish's tail, and then started to swallow it whole. This was fine until it got to the head, because monitors have relatively narrow heads and catfish have flat, wide ones. The fish was already partially eaten, so that its head was only hanging on by a flap of skin, but it was stuck nonetheless.
What did Lizard do? Was it daunted by the prospect of swallowing something about twice the width of its own skull? No! It walked over to the nearest tree and started trying to ram the thing down its throat. When it got tired of that, it tried pulling the head off with its claws, and when that didn't work it went back to attempting the tree method.
I could hear a French family on one side of me and a Thai family on the other, having the exact same conversation in their respective languages: "is it eating a turtle?" "no, it's a fish!" "a fish?" "yes, a giant catfish." "woooow."
And the crows were still hangin' round, ever the optimists.
We just stood there, fascinated. I wonder if this is a normal behaviour? I mean, catfish seem to be these guys' main prey. I don't see how our Lizard would have grown so big if it didn't know how to effectively eat one. But it looked so brutally uncomfortable.
We had to leave, eventually, and it was still alternately trying to pull the head off or shove it down via tree-trunk. I hope it triumphed.
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