If you were hoping for a David outwitting Goliath story, this is not that.
But photographer Carol Ann Ryan recently captured an epic battle for survival of the fittest. From atop Signal Hill in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Ryan spotted a silver fox in search of a meal.
“I braved the -13 temperature this morning hoping I would see a fox,” she posted on Instagram Feb. 23. “I haven’t seen them them in almost three weeks, and what do you know…. there he was…. on the hunt for breakfast.”
The clever fox found and faced-off with a tiny vole, which appears to beg for its life.
“I have to look at it as Nature, the food chain, and survival,” she wrote on Instagram.
The fox did, in the end, outmatch the vole.
“I know it’s a little vole and I love all animals, but I have to look at it as Nature and it is their instinct for survival,” Ryan wrote. “This is the wild in its truest form.”
Ryan really did witness wildlife in action from start to finish.
She spied a hungry fox bracing itself against the elements.
And she captured its spellbinding athleticism.
As well as how it ends.
Sometimes, it is survival of the hungriest — and biggest.
“He was finished here and put his head up and the wind was still whipping around,” Ryan wrote. “He trotted off, sat on a hill and had a look around and then off he went.”
Photos Carol Ann Ryan/Instagram
