Wildlife photography requires great technical skill, and it also involves a bit of luck. Being in the right place at the right time can land you a once-in-a-million shot that, in one fell swoop, epitomizes the wild world. Photographer Sha Lu recently captured an image like that. In his photo, an unlucky vole is powerless in the talons of a white-tailed kite as it soars away with the rodent in mid-air. To further illustrate its haplessness, the vole looks directly at Lu’s camera with an expression that poignantly recalls the record-scratch meme, “Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation…”
Lu captured the image on June 15, 2025, in Mountain View, California. The photographer has been shooting white-tailed kites for many years and is particularly interested in photographing their mid-air food exchanges, where a male typically trades the prey it caught with a female, all while in the air. Lu arrived at his local park that day, hoping to shoot that type of image.
“At 8 a.m.,” he writes, “the male came back with a vole and performed a food exchange with one of the [white-tailed kite] juveniles very close to me. At that moment, I was actually pretty disappointed and felt that it was a wasted opportunity for such a close-range shot (this was rare, since most actions happened pretty far away), because the juvenile had its back toward me and blocked the visibility of the prey in most frames.”
Lu began exploring other “less interesting” shots during his post-processing session. “It was then that I started to discover the vivid ‘expressions’ of the vole in some of the frames,” he explains. This was a rare and fortuitous turn of events for Lu. “Usually the prey is mostly hidden during the kite’s flight so it is very rare that the entire vole was visible and it seemed to be looking at the camera! It was probably because it was only flying a very short distance, so it didn’t bother to fully tuck away the vole.”
If you like seeing viral animal photographs, be sure to check out the epic battle between a blue heron and snake and a crow taking an ant bath.
Photographer Sha Lu captured a perfectly timed shot of an unlucky vole being carried away by a white-tailed kite.
In the now-viral image, the vole looks directly into Lu's camera.
