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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. <\/p>\n
Lu spotted the kite and its prey in Mountain View, California, last month. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d he says. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Voles are small rodents that are closely related to hamsters, although they have a longer, hairier tail and a slightly rounder head. They aren\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n
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The vole might appear to be rather large in this photo, but it\u2019s 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\u2019t 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<\/a>. <\/p>\n The white-tailed kite is found all around the Americas, but isn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n \u201cThey generally start foraging just after dawn, when you\u2019ll 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,\u201d All About Birds explains<\/a>.<\/p>\n While voles don\u2019t emote with facial expressions like humans do, it\u2019s hard not to see a look of helplessness on its face in Lu\u2019s 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\u2019s most famous photo of a snow leopard that proves difficult to see<\/a>, an epic battle between a great blue heron and a banded water snake<\/a>, another heron stealing a baby alligator from its mother<\/a>, a hawk and owl fighting mid-air over a vole<\/a>, and (perhaps most famous) a \u201conce in a lifetime photo\u201d of a bobcat pouncing on and taking down a giant blue heron mid-flight<\/a>.<\/p>\n Image credits: Photographs by Sha Lu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wildlife photographer Sha Lu captured a unique photo of a hapless vole in the clutches of a white-tailed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5358,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[7247,64,63,7248,7249,485,7250,128,7251,7252,7253,338,7254],"class_list":{"0":"post-5357","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-actionshot","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-bird","12":"tag-birdphotography","13":"tag-california","14":"tag-kite","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-telephotolens","17":"tag-vole","18":"tag-whitetailedkite","19":"tag-wildlife","20":"tag-wildlifephotography"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/hapless-vole-sp-1397899-800x587.jpg\")
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