Also after a river crossing...

I'm envious of Cindy's wildebeest river crossing series. One of my main goals for my recent three-week trip to Africa was a great crossing shot during my week in the Mara, but luck wasn't with me. Our group saw one large Mara river crossing, on the game drive where I was back in the tent with food poisoning (sigh..) We did have one small crossing of the Talek river near camp, where I thought I got great shots, but lost them all to an 'Err 01' on my 1Ds, cleared by popping the battery out before the images were written to the card. After I cleared the error, I got some shots of the animals leaving the water, took a look behind me to see if there were any good shots of the animals walking away, then turned back to the river to see this lone female lion ten feet away. She had been hiding in the bushes waiting for the weak stragglers from the crossing. Right after I saw her, she ran down the river bank and picked out this rather large animal to attack. I got a sequence of 12 or so frames of the attack and take-down, not thinking to zoom all the way out on my 70-200 until late in the sequence. This shot is cropped almost full-height vertical from a horizontal. There were two of us in the only vehicle that was in the right spot to see/photograph this event, and we were still shaking two hours later at dinner. It was the highlight of a trip full of them.

Canon 1Ds, 70-200 IS lens at 200mm, 1/400sec at f4, ISO 400