Little Green Heron Grabs a Tadpole

The little green heron's strike happens extremely fast and infrequently. Thus, photographing this bird in action involves lots of waiting with occasional sudden lightning-fast action. A few minutes into waiting for a strike, attention deficit kicks in, and one's mind begins to think about other matters. Of course, the sudden action we have been waiting for happens while our minds are adrift, and we miss the shot.

That is not the case with the Canon EOS R5 Mark II. Mind drift is no longer an issue with the R5 II's game-changing pre-continuous shooting feature because we can seemingly capture images from the past.

Without being especially alert while half-pressing the shutter release, I still captured this heron's surprise full strike and recoil. This image is the second in the 20-fps sequence to have the tadpole fully out of the water. The tadpole's alignment with the shadow behind it, along with a nice stream of water falling from the catch, made this selection optimal.

While the general area of tadpole attack could be estimated, the specific prey location was unknown. Thus, framing slightly wide to account for whatever happened made sense, and this image is cropped by just over 10% in both dimensions. Because of the R5's ultra-high resolution, the final image still measures 4830 x 7241 pixels, about 35 megapixels.