A Grey Heron tries to eat a Signal Crayfish

Filmed 19th July 2018. Well lucky enough to again watch but even better get footage to share of this Grey Heron trying to eat a Signal crayfish. If you don't know, the Signal Crayfish is an invasive species to the UK. Anyway, I came across this Grey Heron and watched it try to eat the crayfish. It seemed to be doing what it would normaly do with a fish. So it was banging (dropping) it on the ground and then picking it up, trying to align it lenghtways in its beek ready to swallow whole. But the crayfish has a hard shell and therefore wasnt dead. The Heron tried and tried to swallow it whole. One time the Crayfish actualy moved itself along the Grey Heron's beek and the Heron dropped it again. You got to imagine in any case, that the hard shell of the crayfish and legs, must feel a lot different than a fish. I shudder to think what it felt like trying to swallow it whole. I watched the Heron for about 15 minutes. At first I was on my own, in the video you may hear footsteps on the gravel path, as one person comes along and stops to also watch the Heron. I thought it would fly off, as they often will, we were close. But luckily it didn't. The only reason it did fly off was there were three people at a workshop across the river on a lunch break that started to look on. I imagine the Heron felt surrounded and therefore moved off. The people apart from me then left. I walked towards where it had dropped the Crayfish, which now looked dead, and saw the Heron was a few feet away waiting for us to go to try and resume eating the crayfish. So I decided to go to let the Heron try and have its meal. A couple hours later I went back to see if the crayfish was eaten, but it wasn't. After all that effort it only managed to eat a small piece (I think the tail) that you see broke off in the video. I wander if it comes across another crayfish, if it will bother? In a survival situation I am sure that it would. But I rarther think that unless it is in a survival situation and starving, a crayfish may be off the menu... at least for a while. This summer has been great and as today (29th July 2018) brings wind and rain after an amazing long stretch of great sunny weather, a remember telling someone, no matter how hot it gets, we'll miss it as soon as the rain comes again, and sure enough, I do.