We don’t think of small forest passerine birds as particularly ferocious. Except maybe pīwakawaka…but that’s because their eyebrows are quite intense:

We know that many of them are insectivorous, gulping down all kinds of small crawling things to fuel themselves for flight. I was pretty impressed, though, to see a pīpipi (Brown creeper, Mohoua novaeseelandiae) munching on a rather large stick insect at Hinewai reserve.

The bird didn’t manage to eat the whole thing as something startled it, and the poor stick insect was dropped to the forest floor half-dismembered. It was just the size of the prey that surprised me, because it’s not something I had come across before. Larger birds eating big stick insects – sure – I’ve seen tūī scoff them a few times. I’d never have picked up on this if I hadn’t been photographing at the time though, the action was too fast in a dark forest to follow with the naked eye. That’s one of the things I love about photography, the way it can enhance our own biological knowledge about a species, by aiding our ability to observe them up-close, and freeze action we’d otherwise miss.