Sacred Kingfisher – Birds as Poetry —— Just because I WANDER

Little Visits: When I Grow up I want to be a Black-shouldered Kite

April 15, 2021April 17, 2021Posted in Little Visits, Sacred KingfisherTagged Little Visits, Sacred Kingfisher9 Comments

Ha! Kids today have such ambitions.

For the queasy of stomach, time to click away.

This is just about straight out of the “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!” archives.

It was a cold wet morning. However #kneetoo was keen to see how the little Kingfishers were progressing, and we only had a narrow space in the ‘very busy’ diary.

Knowing they had been on the wing for several days, our probability of anything other than a chance encounter were slim to say the least.

Nothing around the now abandoned nest site, nor by the old blackened stump training ground.

I managed a sighting of a small blue blur in the forest and headed over for a looksee. And sure enough a young one perched among the branches of a black wattle.

Then with no warning, an adult turned up with quite a large bundle. And at first it was difficult to make out. Not a large skink or beetle.
Are they really legs, or is it a fish tail I could see?

Then she flipped it about in the air and it was a mouse! No way!

At first the young one didn’t seem all that interested, but after a few more flips and attempts to turn it round so the small end would go down first the adult presented it to the young one.

Now on an aside, your average field-mouse is around 20gm. Your average grown Sacred Kingfisher might come in a touch over 30gm. So I’m guessing the little dude was at best, 25gm.
UPDATED: HANZAB give the bird a weight of 55g which would be a more reliable weight I think. Still give the little dude 35gm and it’s going to be a 55gm tubby blue blob for awhile. 🙂

It took the mouse head first, not headfirst, even that suits. 🙂

And so began a 10-15 minute battle for the young one to eventually ingest the mouse.
On quite a number of occasions, it had to stop, and I guess catch its breath, or simply rearrange the internal spaces to make space.

A couple of times it began swaying back and forth on the branch, and I feared it was going to choke and fall off the branch. Not much in my skill set for resuscitating a downed Kingfisher.

And slowly—very slowly—the mouse began to disappear.

After it was all over, a tubby little kingfisher gave a few shakes of its body, to rearrange all the feathers and no doubt the internals, and then sat. More likely squatted.

A few minutes quietly sitting to let the digestion process begin, and a tubby blue blur sped off through the forest.

Where is Ripley when you need him?

Little Visits: They’ve Flown

April 7, 2021Posted in Sacred KingfisherTagged Sacred Kingfisher9 Comments

For several previous days, it was apparent that the young Kingfishers were getting ready to fly. Interestingly, they are pretty much fully developed when they fly, and while the parents still top them up with food, they appear to have some hunting ability for easy to find prey

#kneeetoo, and I arrived early one morning and waited for the usual food supply activity. After a bit of time had passed, it was obvious that something had changed. A further hunt around the nest area, and following the adults, we soon found, the first of the flown young. It’s plaintive cry for food was taken care of by both the adults, and just occasionally would one venture to the nest opening and deposit a top up snack, so, a second one was still nest bound.

The following day, it too had broken free from the nest and we found them moving about the forest with ease.
A tree had caught fire a few days before and the local fire and park people had cleaned up the mess, and cut down the old red-gum tree, as the fire had eaten through the inside. So there was a lot of downed timber as well as cleared spaces, and the young Kingfishers were taken there by the adults to sharpen their hunting skills.
It was a bonus for your photographers as the venerable old gum had supplied some fine landing spaces for the Kingfishers and some of the larger trunk pieces a good place to sit and watch the activity.
As the morning went on, the young became engrossed in being fed, and learning to feed themselves and completely ignored out presence, often landing only an arm’s reach or so away. Sometimes too close for the lens to gain focus.

In the end, a mid-morning rain brought closure for our efforts and the young took off to find some shelter.

Little Visits: Kingfisher Feeding

April 1, 2021Posted in Sacred KingfisherTagged Sacred Kingfisher9 Comments

Still continuing with the Kingfisher Nursery.
The young had been hatched about 3 weeks, and were now quite grown. But almost impossible to see as the tree opening had a rather large lump of wood that covered part of the hole, and it was difficult to get a glimpse.

Kingfisher young fly pretty much complete, in that they are capable in a few days of fledging to be self-sufficient. Although the parent birds keep up a good food supply.

Here then is a selection from that last week feeding.

The setup is pretty much as described previously. Main flash high and to the left. Using the Auto FP setting on the Nikon D500 to override the usual problem of working with faster shutter speeds. On Auto FP, the SB910 Flash-units fire multiple times in what seems to be a continuous stream of light from the beginning to end of the exposure so all the sensitive chip receives an equal amount of light without any part ‘blacking’ out. Downside is that the poor old SB’s have to drain the charge, and I can only get two or three frames per in or out flight. Then of course the battery has to recharge the unit, so it’s a few seconds delay. I’m sure that Eric Hosking with his half ton of batteries or Steven Dalton in his studio set up didn’t have that problem 🙂

Enjoy

Little Visits: What’s on the Menu

March 18, 2021Posted in Sacred KingfisherTagged Sacred Kingfisher6 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

Little Visits: The Steady Procession

March 11, 2021March 11, 2021Posted in Sacred KingfisherTagged Sacred Kingfisher10 Comments

Having found our needle in the haystack, we made plans to visit regularly to see how things were progressing.

Because of the situation of the tree in question, it kind of determined an early morning start. Which in hindsight turned out to have several advantages. And of course the obvious dis. Getting up and rolling just after sunup. Daylight saving is never high on my must have lists. As early starts have one other dis. The day becomes very long. Good excuse for a ‘nanna nap,’ I hear you cry. 🙂

The general layout of the area helped a lot too. Kingfishers are pretty fussy about location, so there were several branches that became favoured perches for checking things out before delivering food, and also to get the right angle of attack to sweep into the nest, deposit the food and depart.

The average person in the bush would not notice ‘corridors’ through the trees, but no so Kingfishers. It took us several visits to work out where they were coming from, and so could be prepared, and where, on leaving, they were disappearing to.

While they were still sitting eggs, the food visits were around the hour or so, usually a little longer. Once the young were hatched, the time between appearances was within 20 minutes or so. Both adults were involved in the feeding.

Here is a selection from that first couple of weeks. It was interesting to note that food sources were varied. After cleaning out the skinks, they moved on to centipedes and the like, and occasionally some aquatic fare as well.

Little Visits: Like a Needle in a Haystack

March 3, 2021Posted in Sacred KingfisherTagged Sacred Kingfisher12 Comments

…. or a Kingfisher in a Forest.

“Found It”, the text message said. Neil A. and I both smiled.
We had been photographing the nesting Hobbys and EE had decided to leave us, and venture further on down into the forest to look for a pair of nesting Sacred Kingfishers.
Sacred Kingfishers are not noted for putting up a Neon Arrow pointing the way, and to say that sacred could also be interpreted as ‘furtive’ would not be pushing the language too far.

Sacred Kingfishers in our area come down from up north in late Spring and after a lot of calling through the forest, select a suitable small opening in an old tree and move in.
They don’t spend a lot of time sitting around contemplating their next move. The most we usually see is a flash of green and blue disappearing into the forest.

The one upside is that they have a particular ‘skcrrrarrk’ call when they are near the nest. They also are able to sit perfectly still for many minutes and because of their colour set will simply blend into the surrounding forest colours.

However, with several seasons under her belt, and eyesight and intuition that must have been handed down through the gene pool for generations, Neil and I both had our money on EE’s ability.

The ring on my phone, announced in the absolute minimum of words, that the hideout was located. Neil had other places to go, and so we parted company and I headed on into the scrub. Now, my challenge was not to locate the Kingfisher nest, but rather to hopefully find EE, another needle in a very large haystack.

To my surprise she wasn’t too far from where we’d spied a bird a few days before, just off a main track.

Another succinct conversation. “There.”

Well, I could see a number of trees with holes that might have been useful. A pair of Red-rumped Parrots popped their heads out of one, and a fierce looking pair of Rainbow Lorikeets seemed to have another hole staked out. So I eliminated them from the search.

“He’s coming”, EE called, and in short time a male Sacred Kingfisher turned up on a branch not that far from where we were standing.

He sat.

Twirling a small skink in his beak, he sat.

Then a few wing-flaps and he had delivered the meal to a hole in an old tree just across a small dry water course.
“Oh, there.”

We concluded that he was feeding the good lady as she was sitting on the eggs. And perhaps an hour or so later she poked her head out, and then flew before we even had a chance to press a shutter.

Now we knew.
Time to plan a full scale Expotition as Winnie the Pooh would say.
“Pooh tells Rabbit about the Expotition (which he says is a sort of boat, which might not be exactly right, but we shall have to wait and see.

But in the meantime we were watching it unfold.

Yawning as he contemplates going out for the next hunt, or laughing at the futile attempts to locate the nest.

Food up. Delivering top up snacks to the female sitting on the nest. It is quite a tiny hole.

Sometimes the transfer fails and he has to make another turn around.

A quick peak to make sure all is clear and the like a bolt of green and blue she was out of the nest and away.

More as they say, to follow.

Sacred Time

October 12, 2017October 12, 2017Posted in Sacred Kingfisher, Uncategorized, Werribee River ParkTagged Sacred Kingfisher, Werribee River Park10 Comments

Sacred Kingfishers on the Werribee River Park. 12 October 2017

There are billions of photographs out there. The world in no way 
needs more mediocre images. 
What the world does need is more passionate photographs, 
images that begin life conceived by the eyes, 
but expressed through the lens by the heart. 
If you are going to create better photographs, 
begin with things you care about deeply. : David DuChemin

You are Welcome Here.

“It’s a Sacred Kingfisher,” Mr An Onymous called. To no one in particular, and those around him just looked and nodded hoping that was the end of the outburst.

“Pee-p, Pee-p, Pee-p, Pee-p”. It is a Sacred Kingfisher says Mr A. But quietly, to himself.

He dropped me a note and I was glad of the info. We’d been talking of their return the past few weeks.

I told EE. She put on her skates and was ready to go. Those who follow her Flickr posts will be well aware of the time, energy and effort that she put into the pair the past season. It is, “Something she cares deeply about”. And being passionate, as David DuChemin is wont to remind, “Photographing those things you are passionate about tells me several things. It shows me more of you. It shows me more of the thing you love. And it makes better photographs.”

So we went. Now the access road to the “Office”—Werribee River Park— for new readers, has been closed these last six weeks or so. The road was ripped up by hoons and 4wds when it was wet, and the road had become nigh on impassable for normal vehicles. Think Sir Perceval—i20— for new readers. But a check the day before had shown Parks Vic had sent in the heavy duty toys and the road had been re-graded, and surfaced and was a version of Dorothy’s Yellow Brick Road, for all the Wizard of Oz fans. So donning our “Ruby Slippers” —or Silver ones if you’ve read the book— we set off in search of Oz, or Sacred Kingfishers if they turned up first.

Continue reading “Sacred Time” →

An easy day out

October 28, 2016October 28, 2016Posted in Birdsaspoetry, Crested Pigeon, Pacific Gull, Point Cook, Sacred Kingfisher, Yellow-tailed Black CockatooTagged Crested Pigeon, Magpie-lark, Point Cook Coastal Park, Sacred Kingfisher4 Comments

Friend of mine once said in conversation as we chatted about my time in the bush, “Bird photography is pretty easy, you just sit in a deckchair and photograph any birds that happen to come by.” And today, for once, he was right. Thanks for the advice John.

Mr An Onymous had looked at the weather maps, the weather forecasts, the icon ladies and I guess in the end, just plain looked out the window, and declared we should take a trip to Point Cook Coastal Park on Friday. Sounded good as we’d not been out that way since the end of the Flame Robin season, most of the birds were well on their way back by mid of September.

Meet you down there, and so we did.