{"id":48332,"date":"2017-05-18T05:03:43","date_gmt":"2017-05-18T11:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=48332"},"modified":"2017-05-18T05:30:18","modified_gmt":"2017-05-18T11:30:18","slug":"the-kingfisher-is-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/05\/18\/the-kingfisher-is-back\/","title":{"rendered":"The Kingfisher Is Back!"},"content":{"rendered":"

And this time there’s two of them, though I don’t yet know if either one is my old friend. This one isn’t, for sure.<\/p>\n

Readers will remember a female Belted Kingfisher that has made sporadic appearances at a favorite fishing spot near the Jordan River over the past several years. I haven’t seen her or any other kingfisher there for almost six months now and that’s been very disappointing.\u00a0I’m sure I’ve made at least 100\u00a0trips (a short\u00a0drive from my home\u00a0of perhaps 3\u00a0miles)\u00a0to that area of the river in that amount of time just to look for her but she’s never been there.<\/p>\n

But I keep plugging away and yesterday afternoon I checked\u00a0once again and lo and behold there “she” was! –\u00a0in the same tree overlooking her\u00a0favorite fishing spot. I usually\u00a0don’t have my photo gear with me on those trips (too much trouble for the extremely unlikely chance she’ll be there) so I rushed home, grabbed my gear, and broke my\u00a0time record for getting back to the river (never once exceeding the speed limit of course – hah!) in hopes that she’d still be there. She was.<\/p>\n

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Except it wasn’t her.<\/p>\n

Once I got a good look at “her” I could see that it was actually a male. He was extremely\u00a0skittish and\u00a0lighting conditions were volatile and usually poor so\u00a0most of the images I got yesterday were of\u00a0mediocre quality and taken from far away so don’t expect any\u00a0great\u00a0photos in today’s post. But I wanted to document my exciting find and share it with all of you.<\/p>\n

Here he’s watching for fish in the water below him.<\/p>\n

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I caught him in a single dive…<\/p>\n

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and because I was far away…<\/p>\n

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I was able to keep him in frame for three images. This time he came up empty.<\/p>\n

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And\u00a0the next time he was a little closer when he took off…<\/p>\n

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so I almost missed him when it happened.<\/p>\n

I’m only including this image because of the strange-looking green “film” between the upper and lower portions of his bill. Perhaps it’s only mucosy\u00a0saliva with green light reflected in it but it’s something I’ve never seen before so it aroused my curiosity.<\/p>\n

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He only came\u00a0close once for about two seconds and he was in mediocre light when he did it but the detail and sharpness on those wet feathers in this shot\u00a0are pretty good.<\/p>\n

And to be perfectly honest I don’t know for sure if all of these shots are of the same bird. Just before or just after this photo was taken (can’t remember which) another kingfisher flew in and the two birds had a brief and completely unexpected confrontation before one of them flew off. I don’t even know if the other bird was male or\u00a0female – it’s possible it was the mate of this male. Hopefully time will tell as I make\u00a0more trips\u00a0to the river in the coming days.<\/p>\n

Please\u00a0indulge me for posting these mostly mediocre images. Even though most of us have never actually met I consider many of my readers to be good friends and I wanted to share this exciting news with my friends. Usually I have to drive 50 – 100 miles to get to my birding spots but I adore kingfishers and\u00a0this sighting opens\u00a0up convenient and close possibilities for me.<\/p>\n

I hope it pans out.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

And this time there’s two of them, though I don’t yet know if either one is my old friend. This one isn’t, for sure.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48338,"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],"tags":[2329,3385,144,146,188,211,311],"class_list":["post-48332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-belted-kingfishers","category-birds","tag-belted-kingfisher","tag-ceryle-alcyon","tag-fishing","tag-flight","tag-jordan-river","tag-male","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/belted-kingfisher-0327-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-czy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48332","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=48332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48332\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}