Grey Heron eating fish that was caught by Indian Cormorant

[Atul Sinai]

It was around 10.30 in the morning on a beautiful Sunday morning. I was shooting along the coast of river Mula with my bag lying on the ground, tripod set-up and the camera mounted on it. I observing and waiting for some action to unfold.

Suddenly far away, I saw an Indian Cormorant with a fish. It was barely visible through naked eyes, an awkward angle to shoot and literally no time in hand.

As I tried to understand what’s happening, a Grey heron resting on the nearby perch attacked the Cormorant ferociously. It appeared as if it waiting for this moment, thus creating an opportunity to feed itself. The Cormorant was caught unaware had to let go off the fish. The victorious Grey Heron managed to fetch the fish from the water surface in very first go.

It then flew around with the fish and perched on its favorite perch. Now that’s what I wanted. It was right in front of me, just a river in between the two of us.

As I tracked the action, I managed to take some decent flight shots. It was a big catch and the patience of the Heron had paid off.

After a series of images with continuous shooting, I quickly set the camera to video mode with 3x digital zoom. This allowed me considerable reach (1200mm) to closely document the action. I wanted to study how this bird eats such a big fish.

Video graphed the action for 1 minute and 36 seconds. Was challenging to get shake free video with ball head and 1200mm focal length combination on the a 1.6 crop factor camera.

Footage was shaky in start and again in the end as my fingertips touched the camera, but fortunately the key 20 seconds were without any shake.
Had to let go some dramatic images for the sake of the footage, but the output was satisfactory.

It felt amazing to watch it balance itself while attempting to eat the catch. Initial moments were a struggle for the heron to balance itself, but then it stabilized, paused for a moment and then slowly changed the angle of the fish in jerks from 90 degrees to its beak to 60...to 30 and finally to zero making it parallel to the beak.

Once this was accomplished, swallowing was a routine. As soon as the fish goes in, the neck gets elongated and thick, you can almost feel the fish inside. It took another couple of minutes to swallow it completely. It had to move its neck back and forth in order to get this done.

As soon as it swallowed the neck moved out of the frame and the video got messed up a bit. It was a pleasurable experience to witness this action and document it. After the session ended, had a satisfactory walk back home thinking about what could have been done better.

Video: http://youtu.be/4xkklG52nyA