Rock hyrax friends

Yesterday I posted a picture of a genet, and I said with tongue-in-cheek humor that my nomination for the ‘Little Five’ of African animals was, beside the genet, the dik-dik, rock hyrax, mongoose, and honeybadger. One of my followers asked me to post pictures of all of these creatures because she had never seen them, so here is a rock hyrax. Believe it or not, it is considered a distant relative of the elephant! It is not a rodent, although admittedly it looks like a large rat with fangs. In a photo like this with two prominent subjects, it’s essential to render both of them in focus. Had one of the animals been a bit soft, the photo -- in my opinion -- would have been a failure. Therefore, since I was using a telephoto with shallow depth of field, I had to wait for the moment when both animals were equidistant to the camera. That would mean that at any lens aperture, they would both be sharp. My settings were 1/320, f/5.6, and 640 ISO. I took this with a 100-400mm lens. Tomorrow I’ll post my only shot of a dik-dik.