Last week I shared a series of images of an unsuccessful Fairy Tern fishing dive. I mentioned another Fairy Tern that was fishing in a different part of the estuary that seemed to have a much higher success rate. This series of images shows that bird with a captured fish.

In this sequence the bird had dived too far away for me to capture the dive. It took off and flew past me while subduing the wriggling fish before banking to head back to feed its partner on the nest. This gave an opportunity to capture another Fairy Tern behaviour.

From a photography technique perspective this sequence reinforces the importance of manual exposure for birds in flight. If an automatic exposure mode had been used the varying luminance of the background would have resulted in overexposure of the tern and destroyed the images. I have written about this previously but this series is a good reminder of the point.

Photos with Nikon D850 and Nikon 500mm f5.6PF lens