Please could you look at the attached file and give me your honest opinion
this was shot at a local wildlife park, i was using a canon 5d monted on a tripod with a
1.4x + 2x teleconvertor on a 300mm f 2,8 lens, giving the effective focal length of 780mm

iirc, Rods have been proved to be a photographic phenomena caused by fast insect speeds and shutter times, I'm sure someone has a more technical explanation.

That's a pretty good one.

A video camera will capture images at 25-30 frames per second depending on what country you are in. If you point your camera at a computer monitor running at 70hz (for example), you will see all kinds of flickering in the video that you don't see on the computer screen. This is due to the monitor refresh being out of sync with the camera. So if an insect can beat its wings at odd multiples of times/second, there is bound to be distortion when it shows up on video.

I've taken similar pictures that have been passed off as insect flight paths. another possiblity is seed pods. i've seen plenty of plant seeds that look like this.

The 2 key pieces of information not disclosed are the shutter speed and aperture used - the exif data has been stripped so we can't establish these.

Yeah, just a glitch with the camera.

Hehe..rods.....

RODS are a videographic artifact based on the frame capture rate of the videocam versus the wingbeat frequency of the insects.

Essentially what you see is several wingbeat cycles of the insect on each frame of the video, creating the illusion of a "rod" with bulges along its length. The blurred body of the insect as it moves forward forms the "rod," and the oscillation of the wings up and down form the bulges.

Anyone with a camera can duplicate the effect, if you shoot enough footage of flying insects from the right distance.