{"id":100884,"date":"2021-08-01T06:08:09","date_gmt":"2021-08-01T12:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=100884"},"modified":"2021-08-01T08:08:13","modified_gmt":"2021-08-01T14:08:13","slug":"this-is-what-an-unlucky-morning-photographing-kingfishers-looks-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/01\/this-is-what-an-unlucky-morning-photographing-kingfishers-looks-like\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is What An Unlucky Morning Photographing Kingfishers Looks Like"},"content":{"rendered":"

The potential was there but except for some interesting behavior near the end I might as well have stayed home.<\/p>\n

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Yesterday morning in the mountains part of the Belted Kingfisher family showed up to fish in the stream that has been partially rejuvenated by our recent monsoonal rains. This young female was loosely accompanied by her male parent who is perched on the far right side of the same dead tree. Both were obviously using their perches in the tree to fish from.<\/p>\n

The adult male was mostly buried in the branches but the young female was out in the open so I concentrated on her. I was optimistic about getting takeoff and flight shots when she dove on a fish because she’d most likely be in front of the branches to the left during takeoff and it was clear sailing after that. I had a nice background and reasonably good light so I was willing to sit there waiting for her to dive on a fish for what seemed like an eternity.<\/p>\n

But she threw a kingfisher wrench into my plans.<\/p>\n

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She quickly turned 180\u00b0 on her perch and took off to my right which put her behind all the branches. Because she was so close to the branches she had to twist 90\u00b0 in flight to avoid hitting them with her right wing which gave me a wonderful and unusual flight posture. But thanks to the branches it was all in vain.<\/p>\n

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When she took off from a different perch a few minutes later she did pretty much the same thing for three…<\/p>\n

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consecutive…<\/p>\n

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shots in a burst. She took off behind branches twice more that morning but I’ll spare readers the pain of looking at the results.<\/p>\n

Earlier this summer the adult male was quite tolerant of his offspring, seeming to encourage their efforts to learn how to fish and even delivering the occasional small fish to them. But by yesterday all that had changed. Several times I saw him get visibly upset when the young female came anywhere near him. At one point when she landed a little too close to him he started chattering loudly, raised his wings in a threat posture and eventually…<\/p>\n

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went on the attack. He chased her off, effectively displacing her from her perch, and then…<\/p>\n

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he let her know in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t pleased having to share his fishing territory with her.<\/p>\n

By this time of year he’s really beat up from molt and the rigors of raising a family so maybe that’s part of the reason he was more grumpy than usual. This behavior was fascinating to see but the rest of my morning with the kingfishers was mostly a waste.<\/p>\n

Yes I know, every bird photographer has days like this but for me, when it happens with kingfishers, I reserve the right to bellyache about it. Kingfishers were a nemesis of mine for far too long for it to be otherwise.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The potential was there but except for some interesting behavior near the end I might as well have stayed home.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100895,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2853,334,394],"tags":[4747,2329,5870,137,146,768,190,2330,596,311],"class_list":["post-100884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-belted-kingfishers","category-birds","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","tag-adult-male","tag-belted-kingfisher","tag-displacement-behavior","tag-female","tag-flight","tag-immature","tag-juvenile","tag-megaceryle-alcyon","tag-nemesis","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/belted-kingfisher-0857b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-qfa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100884"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100934,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100884\/revisions\/100934"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}