Day: March 18, 2021

Little Visits: What’s on the Menu

Posted in Sacred KingfisherTagged 6 Comments

Looks like WordPress have put the skids under my basic blogging style.

From now on it seems I have to work with ‘upmarket’, ‘ubeaut’ ‘user friendly’ styles and blocks.

All I wanted was somewhere to put text and photos.
Does not augur well for birdsaspoetry.com on this server.

Whinge over.

We soon became aware of working with the Kingfishers as they fed the young that the light was only really useful on the nesting site for about 45 minutes in the early morning, after that the sunlight slipped behind the river gums and we were going to be hampered by slow shutter speeds and high iso.

It’s been awhile since I lugged large electronic flash about on to a site for photographs, but loaded up each morning with a couple of units, a Better Beamer flash extender, and some connecting cables and I setup to get a little flash fill and also keep the shutter speeds high. No tech explanation, but the Nikon system’s use of flash was why we originally bought into the system. Oh, yeah and a bunch of manual focus lenses we were going to use, and now only have one of those left, and its been in the garage box for years! 🙂

High (about a 1 and 1/2 metre up) and to the left gave the most ‘natural’ effect, following the sunlight. But in the end I settled on high (about 1 metre) and to the right as giving me a slightly better colour rendition and better looking fill of the shadows.

As the weeks went by, the different types of food they delivered ranged from small bugs and centipedes, skinks, crustaceans, and every so often small fish.

This is a collection of about 3 weeks of images from that time. It’s just a handful of some of the opportunities we shared with the birds.

Enjoy

  • Sacred Kingfishers are not normally great ‘fishers’, mostly working on land based prey, but this pair seemed to make an exception from time to time
  • All sort of food seemed destined to be turned into young Kingfishers
  • The hazards of feeding growing young. You put it in one end, it comes out the other. This young one had backed up to the hole just as uber arrived.
  • Crickets and Grasshoppers came from the mown grasses on the local golfclub
  • Small eye peeking out into the world. The entrance is a bit cramped by an lump of wood.
  • This is pretty much a week or so before flight. They were able to access the food much more easily as they grew.
  • Skink supper
  • Stuffing a spider into a waiting beak.