Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

  • GuyInMilwaukee

    I believe that was a shrew. Mouse with a long pointed nose.
    This is a hawk and a mouse. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCMl4Na3Ttc

    • Antinous / Moderator

      A bad music warning would have been nice.

      • GuyInMilwaukee

        Edgar Froese? Bad? But hey.. I just picked it for the title. Descent Like A Hawk. No credit?

      • http://twitter.com/Steven_Patz Steve

         it’s Youtube, that’s implied.

  • http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki

    Hootie, no!

    … or “Squawkie” in this case

  • lknope

    You’re not a terrible person.  You fed a hawk!

  • xzzy

    I also managed to kill a mouse once by trying to be nice.. caught a mouse that our cats had cornered, and trapped it in a bucket for overnight storage. Plan was to release it in a field at work the next morning, where we have a large prairie preserve.

    Poor little guy didn’t survive the night. I guess a night in a bucket was too stressful.

    I used to keep gerbils and I know for a fact a gerbil would have been able to survive something like that, so it wasn’t like I suffocated or starved him.

    • jahxman

      It’s possible one of the cats already bit him or batted him across the room and caused some internal injury, which led to his death. Stress is also possible I guess, but cats I’ve had have liked to play catch and release with their prey until the prey can’t play anymore. Usually the cats seem disappointed at this point…

    • showme

      Like, uh, where did you uh, “keep the gerbil?”

      • Tribune

        in the bucket, with the lotion?

        • Antinous / Moderator

          General Gerbil in the bucket with the lotion?

    • James Churchill

      I caught a mouse under a mesh wastepaper basket once. It seemed fine for about ten minutes, but then it freaked out, ran as fast as it could around the cage for a minute or so, then spontaneously expired. Turns out wild mice don’t tolerate captivity at all well; pet mice have to be raised in a cage from birth to avoid this occurring.

    • TheOven

      Mice are kind of designed to die. As I had it explained to me, they can panic and expire. Saves them the horror of being eaten alive I guess. 

  • Kenmrph

    That’s much more convincing than the eagle vs. toddler video.

  • timquinn

    This happened to a kind hearted friend of mine who nursed a squirrel back to life only to have it taken by a raptor immediately after release. It is hard not to laugh at such a thing. Life being so merciless. Better than crying.

  • http://hame.ca/one/ Hamish Grant

    its the “ciiiiircle of liiiiiiife”…

    • voiceinthedistance

      Yeah, that’s what we said to try to cheer up a friend who had her sun conure snatched from her shoulder when walking in her yard in a remote part of Hawaii by an ‘Io (Hawaiian hawk).  It was a cloudless day, and she lives in an old lava flow with almost no trees.  She heard nothing, and felt nothing except for the presence of her pet bird on her shoulder suddenly ending.  The only sound during the act was a faint muffled “whomp” sound from the feathers being struck by talons right next to her ear.  The little bird was bright enough that it might have been targeted from hundreds of yards away, so she never even noticed the predator bird as it approached from high and behind her.  Presumably, they know which is the business end of a human head and knew which way to approach the pair.

      The argument my wife and I presented her was that it could have been worse if the bird just died suddenly from an accident or her negligence.  This way, it quite likely provided a food source for baby hawks.  Not exactly what you want to hear in such a situation, but a bit comforting over time.

      • invictus

        Uh, what? Maybe it’s just the conure sitting behind me speaking, but I’m failing to imagine a time when I would be comforted by the thought “oh, at least he was nutritious.”

        I guess they see things differently in Hawaii.

        • http://twitter.com/jondean jondean

          He never said the argument actually worked.

          • Donald Petersen

            I think I’d tell my kids that li’l Bilbo was just being delivered to Beorn’s house by Gwaihir, who subsists entirely on tofu and gummi worms.  They’d buy that.

          • invictus

            “Not exactly what you want to hear in such a situation, but bit comforting over time.”

            Other than the missing article, he did say just that.

          • http://twitter.com/jondean jondean

            I was mostly joking, but actually that line only reflects his perspective – that he *thinks* it would be a bit comforting over time. No description of her actual reaction.

        • oasisob1

          Hawaii is a land where even the worst offenses can be smoothed over by throwing the chaka. I mean, you’re in Hawaii, how bad can anything be, really?

          • invictus

            Yes, but if we all tried to move there the island might tip over and sink.

      • Antinous / Moderator

        I hate those sneak attacks from above.

  • dculberson

    Hey, it definitely beats the mouse (or shrew) ending up rotting in the landfill due to being killed by a snap trap or poison bait and thrown out.

    • Donald Petersen

      Dunno.  I think I’d have to ask Prometheus if he’d really have preferred the gallows, or maybe lethal injection.

  • Antinous / Moderator

    Was that wastebasket full of Vicodin?

    • http://twitter.com/muzhunter Murray Hunter

      Yes. And notice that, unlike xzzy’s mouse, this one did NOT die of stress.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=696968610 Cori Frazer-Hopkinson

      Chads?

  • A Viescas

    That’s why you look for undergrowth when releasing. At least give the little guy a few minutes to recover from the shock of the outdoors.

    …Still probably going to starve or freeze to death anyway, but fighting chances and all that.

  • Roger Strong

    (Prisoner released after a decade of detention at Guantánamo without charges.)
    (Drone strike)
    Nooo!  I’m a bad person!

    Note:  A detainee’s beard does not imply that he should be called “Whiskers.”

    • Donald Petersen

      Shouldn’t he?

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/YQBOGLHLVDHNCGGBA4KZZZZBWA Hutch Hubbard

    Yet another personal testimonial — We live-trap mice at our home and release them on vacant land elsewhere. One day we pulled off the road by an artificial wetland to let one go, and he started bounding in a broad circle back toward the road. As I was thinking, “Uh oh, hope he doesnt get hit by a…” BAM! a hawk swooped down and scooped him up.
     
    “Why the hell would a human throw away a perfectly good mouse like that…”

  • Daneel

    Hawk Snatches do what now?

  • Tony Sanfilippo

    So this happened on campus earlier this week. That’s a Red Tail eating a rabbit it caught. It amused the heck out of me that it happened in front of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.

    • jhoosier

      I and about 2 dozen other students at uni watched a hawk snatch up a squirrel, take it to the nearest branch and start digging in.

  • garyg2

    Poor Prince Harry, can’t do anything right…

  • tylerkaraszewski

    This reminds me of the time I fed mice to spotted owls.

  • TheOven

    It’s like the Animal Planet version of Final Destination.

  • gedsudski

    I’m calling shenanigans.

  • ROSSINDETROIT

    That happened to a rodent of my acquaintance.  Red squirrels invaded and tore up my garage attic.  While I was tearing out chewed-up fascia boards on the outside of the house one of them ran out of the hole.  It dashed across the yard and stopped to look back at me.  At that moment one of our local Cooper’s hawks swooped down and picked him off.  I was watching from a ladder & saw the whole thing.  I was dumbfounded.  I knew the hawk was around because the pigeons had scrammed.  But I didn’t expect him to make an appearance and defeat my home invader for me.

    ETA: I’m pretty sure I’ve told that story here before at least twice.

  • min amisan

    I tried to save a mouse once, when I caught my cat playing with it. The cat just looked at me with contempt, crushed the mouse with one crunch of its jaws, and walked away. Leaving me with the corpse.

    • Antinous / Moderator

      I tried to get a tiny gecko off a piece of packing tape once. Eventually I realized that it would be better to just stick it in the freezer than to spend ten minutes slowly breaking its bones.

  • Sparg

    Just this morning I saw a mouse running down a sidewalk, along the edge of the buildings, then run under a couple parked cars and hop into a wheel.

  • drkptt

    This happened on a much larger scale a few years ago.  After 7 months of nursing a dolphin back to health it was released–and eaten by a shark:  http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/alleyes/content/dolphin-release-ends-tragically