UNLUCKY VOLE CAPTURED LOOKING DIRECTLY AT CAMERA WHILE SWEPT AWAY AS LUNCH

Photographing wildlife calls for a high level of technical proficiency as well as some degree of chance. You can get a once-in-a-lifetime image that perfectly captures the natural world by being in the right spot at the right time. That's the kind of picture that photographer Sha Lu recently took. In his picture, a white-tailed kite flies off with the rodent in midair, leaving the unfortunate vole helpless in its claws. The vole's expression, which poignantly evokes the record-scratch joke, "Yep, that's me," is directed directly at Lu's camera to further highlight its haplessness. I'm sure you're wondering how I got into this predicament.

The photo was taken at Mountain View, California, on June 15, 2025. After years of photographing white-tailed kites, the photographer is especially interested in capturing their mid-air food exchanges, in which a male trades the prey it has grabbed with a female while in the air. On such a day, Lu came to his neighbourhood park to take such a picture.

“At 8 a.m.,” he writes, “the male came back with a vole and performed a food exchange with one of the [white-tailed kite] juveniles very close to me. At that moment, I was actually pretty disappointed and felt that it was a wasted opportunity for such a close-range shot (this was rare, since most actions happened pretty far away), because the juvenile had its back toward me and blocked the visibility of the prey in most frames.”