Although one can come back from the San Diego Zoo with lots of pictures of elephants, giraffes, polar bears, flamingos, meerkats, and many other animals, those are big animals or animals that remain stationary for lengthy periods of time, making it easy to take their picture.

There is plenty of wildlife in the Zoo that it is virtually impossible to get pictures of, usually for one of five reasons:

1. They like to hide in their exhibit areas, either in their little caves, houses, or behind rocks and branches.
2. They -- or their exhibit areas -- are too small to get a picture when hundreds of people are oohing and aahing in front of them.
3. Their exhibit areas are defined by dense wire mesh, so taking a picture usually winds up with a beautiful picture of wire mesh.
4. They simply refuse to stay still long enough to focus on them and snap the shutter.
5. If they are stationary, they won't be as soon as the young rugrat pounds on the cage.

If one has a long focal length looms like 300 mm, and the wire mesh isn't too dense, and the critter isn't too close to the wire mesh, one can get a good picture.

Standing in one spot for 30 minutes hoping for all conditions to come together only to take the picture and see that at the last microsecond some young child stuck his hand up, which is now the focus of the picture, well, it might be time to move on rather than throwing the rugrat into his own exhibit area.

I have been focusing on these smaller exhibit areas and the smaller wildlife recently and one day I was rewarded by these pictures of the white-headed lapwing (Vanellus albiceps). The two birds featured were preening themselves, which I always enjoy watching. I've saved the preening "motion pictures" because a couple are good and a couple are just plain funny.

The white-headed lapwing is sometimes called a white-headed plover or a white-crowned plover, but lapwings and plovers were named well before genome research determined many of the relationships between birds, and many are being recategorized.

The white-headed lapwing is from Africa and is not an endangered species. It is a wading bird that nests on sand near rivers and eats insects and small invertebrates.