{"id":76522,"date":"2019-10-01T05:13:04","date_gmt":"2019-10-01T11:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=76522"},"modified":"2019-10-01T05:24:38","modified_gmt":"2019-10-01T11:24:38","slug":"an-unusually-cooperative-belted-kingfisher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/01\/an-unusually-cooperative-belted-kingfisher\/","title":{"rendered":"An Unusually Cooperative Belted Kingfisher"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve bitched and moaned for years about how difficult kingfishers are to get close to but yesterday morning this amazingly cooperative female made me feel guilty about badmouthing them for it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The sun was just beginning to reach the trees on the other side of the stream right next to the road so I was driving very slowly in case there were songbirds in there. I’ve photographed warblers, catbirds and others there before. But when I first spotted this bird I literally thought to myself ” That almost looks like a kingfisher but it can’t be because it let me get too close and it’s too calm. A kingfisher would be long gone by now”. It took me a few seconds to accept the fact that it really was a kingfisher.<\/p>\n

And hot damn, she didn’t even fly off when I stopped my pickup!<\/p>\n

Her distance from me is misleading in this photo because it was taken at only 85mm. She’s a little soft because I was in a hurry to switch back to one of my other cameras with a longer lens so I didn’t take the time to check my settings. My shutter speed was only 1\/320 and I was hand-holding my camera but despite the softness I wanted to include the photo to show my readers what I saw at pretty close to “normal” focal length.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

She really was close, especially for a kingfisher.<\/p>\n

It was obvious that she wasn’t actively fishing because she never watched the water below her. I’m thinking that she had already had her fill of fish for the moment and was just warming up in the sun. After all the temps were in the high 20’s while I was photographing her. The downside to her inactivity was that she gave me very little pose variety but I’m not going to complain much about that with her this close for so long. I’ll even grudgingly accept that shadow on her side.<\/p>\n

I do have to wonder about the right side of her bill.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

To me it looks like it’s been somehow abraded and some small pieces of the edge of her upper mandible appear to be missing or at least worn in an unusual manner.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/3200, f\/7.1, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This is just about the only other pose she gave me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The left side of her bill doesn’t seem to have the same abraded appearance as the right side. The apparent difference between the left and right sides of her bill seem a little unusual to me but maybe it was caused in part by a difference in light angle and reflection off of the bill.\u00a0Whether or not her bill is anomalous she appeared to be healthy and when she eventually took off I wasn’t particularly happy with my takeoff shots so I’m not including them.<\/p>\n

Kingfishers along this same stream have been eluding me all summer so to have this pretty lady allow me so unusually close without showing one bit of nervousness was completely unexpected.<\/p>\n

With birds you just never know…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

I’ve bitched and moaned for years about how difficult kingfishers are to get close to but yesterday morning this amazingly cooperative female made me feel guilty about badmouthing them for it.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76523,"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":[2853,5,334],"tags":[2329,137,2330,4761,311],"class_list":["post-76522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-belted-kingfishers","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","tag-belted-kingfisher","tag-female","tag-megaceryle-alcyon","tag-unusual-bill-wear","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/belted-kingfisher-7064-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-jUe","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76522","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=76522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}