This is a friendly encounter between an impala and a red billed oxpecker in Botswana. These birds and impala have a mutualistic relationship in that both benefit. An adult oxpecker can eat about 1000 ticks or 10,000 larvae per day by foraging on the impala. I shot this with a Canon 100-400mm telephoto in early morning sunlight, and my settings were 1/500, f/8, and 400 ISO. At the time, I was using a Canon 7D Mark II with a cropped sensor, so the real focal length was 560mm. I thought this was the perfect combination of camera and lens because the cropped sensor enabled me to leave my large and heavy 500mm f/4 lens at home. In bright light, the camera is fine. But when the ISO gets pushed above 800 due to low light situations, it's much too noisy. Above 1600 ISO, the pictures are virtually unusable. I just bought the Canon R5 and the 100-500mm zoom, and now I think this combination is ideal for a safari along with the 1.4x teleconverter. With this lens combination, the ISO settings will be high, but the noise is minimal with the R5. And, with the great post-processing software we have now, noise is not much of an issue compared to just a few years ago.
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