And I do mean “freshly”. He caught the duck maybe five seconds before this photo was taken, even though he had a broken left rear leg.
1/1250, f/5.6, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in
Early yesterday morning this coyote was in deep shade when ‘he’ captured and killed the duck so many of my photos were soft but this one is sharp enough. Here he had turned toward me only seconds after he caught the shoveler at the shoreline. I don’t believe he even got his feet very wet. If he did it was only some of his toes.
I was highly impressed by how fast and efficiently he killed the duck. One second she was struggling and the next second she was obviously dead. If you’ve gotta go that’s the way to go.
His left rear leg was badly injured (I’m almost sure it was broken) but he had no trouble catching the duck, none at all. And it wasn’t because the duck was injured or unhealthy. I’m quite confident of that, for reasons I hope to document and explain in in a subsequent post. Here his injured leg is mostly hidden by a front leg but the severe swelling near his hock (ankle) can be clearly seen. He never put any significant weight on that leg that I saw, although occasionally he did allow it to touch the ground.
I took over 1000 photos yesterday, most of them of coyotes, but I haven’t yet had the opportunity to go through them carefully. Many of them were taken in shade with resulting softness issues so culling them to see which ones are worth keeping is going to take some time. But eventually I hope to post documentation of a very interesting coyote hunting strategy that I’d never observed in the past.
At least I believe it’s a deliberate hunting strategy. We’ll see what my readers think about that.
Ron
