Camera Crews Spent Years Trying To Capture Footage, Finally Get A Perfect Shot Of It

It is a career making moment for a wildlife photographer. And the great people from BBC’s Blue Planet II managed to capture a moment so rare and beautiful that you’ll want to watch it again and again. In this clip, you’ll watch a giant fish jump through the surface of the water to swallow a bird from flight. The fish in the video is called a giant trevally and can grow to be more than 5.5 feet long.

 



These fish enjoy their meals in a single bite, which stops their hunting rivals from being able to snatch up their meals before they can swallow them down. We’ve recently seen that when a bald eagle swam to shore to eat its meal before another eagle swooped down and stole it out from under the first.

Although this might seem like an impossible feat, you can watch the giant trevally leap from the water and swallow the flying bird in one gulp.

Watch the video below to see what they captured.

The camera crews from Blue Planet II were told that giant trevally were hunting birds off the coast of the Seychelles. So when they heard that rumor, they bolted over to the location and set their cameras to the ready.

Now that they captured the footage, they have gathered a moment, never before caught on camera, that people from around the world are going to want to see. The series begins to air on the last Sunday of October.

When you see this moment, you’ll agree that this moment rivals the scene from Planet Earth II that won awards and featured snakes versus iguanas.

The fish managed to track the bird, which was a tern, before it leaped from the water and swallowed it whole.

Series producer James Honeyborne is overjoyed his teams caught the clip. Here’s what he said:

“It’s one thing seeing a fish flying through the air, that’s unexpected enough. But then seeing a fish flying through the air and catching a bird in its mouth, wow… yep – a bird-eating fish. The fish launches out of the water with phenomenal speed and acceleration and catches this bird in mid-air. And we filmed it in ultra slow-motion.”

These fish, known as giant trevallies, hunt both alone and in schools. And they devour tens of thousands of terns from shorelines along the Pacific and Indian Ocean every year.

Besides eating birds, giant trevallies also eat other fish and have even been known to devour small dolphins and juvenile turtles, the Daily Mail reports.

Game fishermen love going after them because they are tough to catch. They so strong they often break fishing rods and snap lines.

Blue Planet II film crew didn’t even know of giant trevallies really ate birds. At that point it was just a rumor. But Miles Barton, the director of the sequence, said:

“I was skeptical, to say the least. But our researcher Sophie [Morgan] talked to these fishermen, and they convinced us, so we decided to do the shoot. You only do one or two of these types of risky shoots on a show. This was our biggest gamble. We arrived and got very excited because yes, there were splashes everywhere – the fish were leaping out of the water and seemed to be grabbing birds. But it happened randomly and very fast so we didn’t know how we were ever going to get a camera on the action.”

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