Eating Gophers for Lunch

Gruesome, if you're of the gopher persuasion, lunch if you're a heron. This happens every spring, across the street from our house on the edge of the city limits. Heron can't catch fish in muddy high water so they stalk gophers. Typically they stand still as a pencil behind a gopher hole; when the gopher sticks his head up, he gets stabbed with the heron's beak, lifted up all a'wiggle, then stabbed fatally. The heron then tosses his meal up in the air and catches the gopher head first and ... swallows. One spring we saw one heron swallow two gophers in thirty minutes. Talk about overweight!

OK, it's not fine art but it is what cameras and long lenses sometimes do. 

Click on Richard Chapman, then on this photo to see  the whole sequence of eight photographs.