The Little Amputee/Threebanded Plover

Spotted this little bird during a drive through the local Game Reserve today. I only noticed it had no toes when I was looking through the images.
The light was very poor since it was very early morning, I pushed up the ISO but not too much, was afraid of noise. Had to use F4 because I needed shutter speed, this little birdie moves fast. The RAW image was bland and the colors dull, I had to warm it up a bit. Cloned some dark bits in the background. Left the little seedling on the right- it made me think of new life, or something along these lines...

EXIF INFO:

Nikon D3S
Nikon 500mm F4
1/800s
F4
ISO 1250

Nice image - a bit silhouetted - were you shooting into the light? Nice low angle. Good eye contact. I wonder what happened to its foot - an injury or a congenital malformation? I like the idea of the seedling, but it could be a bit sharper.

Richard

Sharp (maybe too much?) sweet sad photo.
Hard to believe it can live long like that.

An amazing eye ring on this little one, I like the HA, light may of been poorish but it seems to of worked out OK in processing. Liking the detail in the sand and the itty bitty green shoot. Wondering if maybe the eye looks a tad bright ....maybe from tweaking in PS.

Sadly lots of birds seem to lose legs/feet for all kinds of reasons...poor little thing

We see that once in a while...these guys are survivors! This one seems to be showing it off :-) Nice low angle, and I like the texture of the sand grains. Perfect head turn. Some fill-flash would have helped here IMO, and as is there a bit of a blue cast to the whites - you can try raising the white balance or just desaturating the blue and cyan channels.

Magnificent image. Beautiful colors and details.
Love the eye and beak.Nice composition too.
TFS.

Regards,
Satish.

Lovely angle and eye contact, ditto great to how they survive like this.

...I posted this image fairly late last night and did not have a second look at it, my eyes struggle in the evenings and I am still trying to adjust to wearing glasses :2eyes2:. This morning I had another look and did not like what I saw-this photograph has a "scratchy" kind of feel to it, and it does look over-sharpened. At the time I took this photo myself and my partner Andre were crossing this little river in the Hluhluwe Game Reserve; the river is barely there, it is winter now and we have had no rain for some time. There was no time to even think of flash, the little bird came out of nowhere and flew into the wet sand, he was so close to the vehicle that Andre's 600mm could not focus on it. He wondered about for a few seconds then suddenly he was out of sight. I only have a few shots of him. The light was not favorable yet I wanted to capture this little bird, at some point he nibbled on a little mollusk and I so badly wanted that shot, but it wasn't to be-there are shadows everywhere. Too many shadows... I used spot metering but I blew the background (so I had to paint over it with soft light, chose a color from the foreground and lightened it). Found another image and did some work on it, I am posting it because the little plover is actually walking in the spoor (tracks) of a lion. A special sighting...

Thank you all so much for your comments and for taking the time to view, I really appreciate it.

Kind regards,