This is a yellow-billed oxpecker on a zebra in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. Each oxpecker can eat thousands of ticks and larvae from many of Africa's large mammals on a daily basis, and they also drink blood from their hosts. So, the relationship between the birds and the mammals is both symbiotic and parasitic. For this shot, I used a 500mm f/4 Canon telephoto plus a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 700mm of focal length. Since I was shooting from a Land Rover, I handheld the large lens and the heavy Canon 1Dx Mark II. My settings were 1/800, f/13, and 3200. In post-processing, I used Neat Image software to mitigate the noise.
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