High speed brain

Birds are amazing. The more I photograph them, the more I appreciate their abilities. For example, this male cardinal can be flying at 30 or 40 miles an hour and then suddenly brake just in time to alight on a cactus with intimidating thorns without getting hurt. They have to make the decision where to place their feet in microseconds. I photographed this scene with camera settings of 1/3200, f/7.1, and 5000 ISO. In the early morning the overcast sky we had required high ISO settings in order to maintain the kind of shutter speed needed to freeze the action. I used a focal length of 500mm.