Red-winged Blackbird with Dragonfly

[Joseph Przybyla]

Interesting behavior I noticed when reviewing the images of this bird. I catches a dragonfly flies to a perch, quickly tearing off the wings and legs, then eats the head, thorax and abdomen. Guess the wings and legs would get in the way. Image captured at Circle B Bar Reserve in Polk County, Florida. Comments and critique welcomed and appreciated. Thank you for viewing.

Nikon D500
Nikon 80-400mm F/4.5-5.6 VRII AF-S ED, image captured at 400mm
1/1600 F/5.6 Matrix Metering EV+2/3 ISO 2200 Auto 1 WB, camera supported by a monopod
Post processed in Lightroom Classic CC, Photoshop CC 2019 and Neat Image for noise reduction
Cropped for composition and presentation

[John Mack]

Sounds like a pretty neat encounter. The pose is nice and great background. More room below would have been nice. Looks like the bird was quite hungry.

[Randy Stout]

Joe:

Cool action, well exposed, good background, crop works OK for me.
Interesting perch.

Cheers

Randy

[greg cowle]

Nice action captured here. Image quality and background are great.

[Ivan Sjogren]

Interesting photo that gets even more exciting together with your story. The background is excellent, the light is very good and the pose is nice. You captured the moment prefectly with a still recognizable dragonfly in the claws and the legs in the beak.
I'm not the biggest fan of the perch. The spriderweb is very nice but it is a bit of a shame that it covers part of the tail. The highlights on the top of the reed might need to be darkened a bit too. Also you lack some fine feather details in the blacks. They look well exposed though. Big crop?

[Daniel Cadieux]

Way cool feeding behaviour!! I'm OK with the spider webbing, but I agree that as posted the subject looks a touch low in the frame. I'd see if you could add some vibrancy to the epaulet. Very appealing BG you got here.