Hapless Vole Looks Directly into the Camera as It’s Carried Away by a Kite

Wildlife photographer Sha Lu captured a unique photo of a hapless vole in the clutches of a white-tailed kite that has gone viral this week. Once again, nature is metal.

Lu spotted the kite and its prey in Mountain View, California, last month.

“The photos show a male adult white-tailed kite carrying a vole. It is the prelude to a mid-air food exchange with one of its juvenile offspring,” he says. “I found the expression of the vole to be quite striking, showing it was very scared and helpless, and appears to be looking at the camera directly.”

Voles are small rodents that are closely related to hamsters, although they have a longer, hairier tail and a slightly rounder head. They aren’t long-lived, with a lifespan of around three months, and have a long list of predators ranging from hawks and falcons to snakes, weasels, raccoons, and foxes. In short, seeing one in the clutches of a raptor is, unfortunately, not uncommon for these little, furry, largely subterranean mammals.

The vole might appear to be rather large in this photo, but it’s unlikely that it is any bigger than five to nine inches long. Its size relative to the kite shows why it might look so big: white-tailed kites aren’t particularly large or long-lived raptors, with even the average mid-sized kites measuring at most 17 inches long and the eldest recorded kite was estimated to have been around six years old.

The white-tailed kite is found all around the Americas, but isn’t particularly common in the United States outside of a small region in southern Florida and Texas and the coastal and central regions of California and Oregon, usually seeking out grasslands or prairies.

“They generally start foraging just after dawn, when you’ll likely catch them hovering into the wind with their head hanging down. You might also be able to catch them hovering in grassy fields at the edges of highways as you drive by,” All About Birds explains.

While voles don’t emote with facial expressions like humans do, it’s hard not to see a look of helplessness on its face in Lu’s photo as it is carried away by the kite, likely to its demise. It joins a series of viral animal images in recent history, including a photographer’s most famous photo of a snow leopard that proves difficult to see, an epic battle between a great blue heron and a banded water snake, another heron stealing a baby alligator from its mother, a hawk and owl fighting mid-air over a vole, and (perhaps most famous) a “once in a lifetime photo” of a bobcat pouncing on and taking down a giant blue heron mid-flight.

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Image credits: Photographs by Sha Lu