This widely circulated photo on the internet is indeed authentic!
The photographer behind the image is Martin Le-May, an amateur photographer from the United Kingdom. In 2015, while taking a stroll with his wife, they unintentionally captured this striking moment.
When the photo was shared on social media, it gained widespread attention and was later covered by media outlets like the BBC, further boosting its notoriety.
The protagonists of the photo are a European green woodpecker and a weasel, but it doesn't depict a friendly encounter between the two animals. Instead, it captures a hunting scene, with the weasel as the hunter and the woodpecker as its prey.
Weasels typically hunt on the ground rather than in trees, while interestingly, the primary food source for this type of woodpecker is also found on the ground.
Despite its small size of around 400g, weasels are fierce predators, capable of taking down prey much larger than themselves, with larger rabbits being a primary food source.
Although woodpeckers are not a primary prey for weasels, conflicts over territory led to this hunting behavior.
Interestingly, woodpeckers are birds capable of carrying objects heavier than themselves during flight.
In a series of coincidences, this photo came into existence. The weasel ambushed the woodpecker, pouncing on its back. The woodpecker's instinctive reaction was to flee, so it flew off with the weasel on its back for a distance.
According to Martin Le-May, he only noticed the scene after hearing a sharp cry of distress and then documented it.
However, the weasel ultimately did not succeed. After flying a short distance, the woodpecker fell to the ground, and the weasel released it, darting off into the grassland while the woodpecker flew away alone.
