Poison comes in small bottles

As a child I remember the hearing the phrase 'good things comes in small parcels - poison comes in small bottles'.  Well, the later end of the statement could ring true of this photo.  Some shrew are venomous and will bite prey bigger than themselves resulting in a slow death.  The shrew will return to the weakened prey and drag it off to hoard it.  

This photo was one of a sequence taken at Ballynafagh Lake.  While walking we could hear a loud shrilling noise and it stopped us in our track.  The noise stopped and as we were about to continue on I looked back along the patch and saw the shrew fighting with the frog.  I grabbed the camera which unfortunately had the wrong lens on (a slow to focus 180mm macro lens).  I was lucky in that I could get fairly close without the fighting creatures noticing me.  I used a shutter speed of 1/1600 in this photo with an aperture of f5 resulting in an ISO of 1600.

Ballynafagh Lake is also known as the Blackwood Reservoir and is 2km north of Prosperous in Kildare.  It is a lovely place to immerse yourself in nature with a nice walking loop. On the day of this interaction I had stayed mostly by the lake taking photos of damselflies and dragonflies and some wild flowers (hence the 180mm macro lens).  The battle was spotted as I returned to the car. 

Closing thoughts: In this battle it looked like it was a neutral fight, the frog looked surprisingly well after the battle.  But...