The Herons and the Shrimp

While in Miami on a short trip in August, I strolled by a marina where there were a lot of shrimping boats docked in the morning. The boats were overrun with herons and egrets. At first I couldn't understand why, but then I realized that many of them had leftovers of the previous day's catch lying around in the boxes on their decks. The shrimp were definitely dead. The birds deployed their usual hunting methods anyway. They would stand on the boxes' edges, slowly move their heads in closer and closer to the targets, strike fearlessly at the mortified crustaceans, and raise them triumphantly in their bills. But while they were doing all that, they didn't pay attention to people, and let me take a few good close-ups (unfortunately Miami in August means solid cloud cover, so the pictures are not as bright as I wanted them to be):