On our recent trip to the Kruger National Park, we were treated to this spectacle right beside the road in a lush, dense tree on my side of the vehicle.
This Burchell's Coucal was attempting to claim the chameleon for lunch. The chameleon, not really being able to defend itself in any way, chose to cling to any branch it could find for dear life (literally) with its paws and tail. As soon as the coucal got one of its paws or its tail wrested away from the twigs, it just grabbed another one with another limb.
This went on for about 15 minutes. I've got many more (and better) shots of this sequence but thought I'd start off with this one where you can see the places on the chameleon's body where it's bleeding and bruised from the coucal's powerful beak. I applied selective blurring to the surroundings as the foliage was very dense and in the same depth of field. Looking back now I should've stopped down to f5 or something (my 100-400 is sharpest @ f8 and I was on that setting, this happened so fast I just started clicking) which would have maybe created more natural blur in the surroundings.
Comments and critique welcome!
Techs:
Canon 1000D with 100-400mm L IS USM @ 220mm
f8.0 @ 1/200 SS @ ISO-200
Partial metering, Pop-up flash fired to make up for dappled light.
Last edited by Morkel Erasmus; 08-10-2009 at 07:41 AM.
Axel - I cropped as such because I wanted to eliminate as much of the dense foliage which contended for the eye's attention as possible. This is about 70% of the full frame. As I said, I've got a few shots of this sighting and will post them as follow-ups, so won't give away the ending now :). I have also never seen this behaviour - the prey is very big for this bird.
Last edited by Morkel Erasmus; 08-10-2009 at 11:50 AM.
This is an amazing documentation of a Wonderful Natural Drama !!! You got a great luck on this one :) I have seen our Greater Coucals hunting calotes here in India are they are pretty good in hunting !!
Burchell's Coucal vs Chameleon
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