Mr and Mrs Kingfisher of Slimbridge

 

My lovely eldest daughter, Louisa, has never seen a Kingfisher so we arranged to meet at Slimbridge this Saturday where a pair have been showing well from the Kingfisher hide.

 

We had two spells in the hide in the morning and afternoon and were rewarded with some truly exceptional views of the courting couple. The Kingfisher hide at the end of the south finger faces a sandy bank on the river where the Kingfishers nest. Early spring is an excellent time to visit as the Kingfishers are renewing their bond with the male catching and offering fish to the female as a love token. The male and female are similar in appearance but can be distinguished by the colour of the lower mandible which is black in the male and orange in the female leading to the old expression that the female wears lipstick. The Kingfisher is perhaps our most unmistakable and colourful bird with blue upperparts, orange underparts and a long bill. Its back is a most beautiful iridescent blue which shimmers in the sunlight. Their flight is fast, direct, and usually low over water and as the bird fly’s away the electric-blue "flash" down its back is very prominent. Somewhat unusually, the Kingfisher has no song but it has a high pitched whistle like flight call that it normally repeats 2 or 3 times.

 

A couple of years ago the nest at Slimbridge failed and there was a concern that the shutter noise of numerous cameras poking out of the hide windows was disturbing them. Very wisely the decision was taken to clamp the windows shut during the breeding season, a decision vindicated by successful breeding every year since. It should also be noted that the Kingfisher is a schedule one bird which is illegal to disturb at the nest site in anyway. Hence all pictures and video here were taken through the window glass. 

 

Given that rather than taking the pictures directly through crystal pure very expensive lens glass they were filtered through cheap window glass, I was pleasantly surprised with the results. A certain amount of post shot processing in Lightroom and Topaz was required but none the less the pictures are fairly sharp.

 

I recently invested in a phone scope adaptor which is basically a plastic coupling allowing my iPhone 14 to mount on my Swarovski scope. The hope was to get at least some pictures of very distant rare birds which are out of range of my Cannon gear. I played around with it a bit while in the Kingfisher hide. A slightly unfair test through the window glass but none the less quite usefully for getting familiar with the setup. The main issue is getting the picture in focus. The reason this is so troublesome is that the depth of field is almost neglectable with the large scope magnifications. The depth of field is measured as the two points either side of the object where the focus is acceptable. The actual focus for any given lens only occurs at one exact point but the eye perceives objects either side up to the depth of field limit to be in focus. For some reason, it was much easier to get the focus reasonable on stills compared to video.

 

We watched the Kingfishers as they came and went around their chosen nest hole with the male regularly offering fish to the female. The female would often go into the nest burrow for a few minutes and come out again. Whether she was building the nest at the bottom of the borrow or had started laying was unclear. Birds typically lay one or two eggs a day and many species will wait until the whole batch is laid before commencing incubation. Some other birds, notably Owls, will start incubating as soon as one egg is laid. This will mean the older chicks will be much larger than the ones from the last eggs laid and more likely to survive if food runs short for any reason. I’m not sure which category the Kingfisher falls in but her brief visits to the nest burrow clearly indicated that brooding had not commenced.

 

We visited most of the other hides on site and I managed to show Louisa Ruff, Barn Owl, Redshank, Teal, Widgeon, Pintail, Godwits,  Avocets, and a singing Willow Warbler amongst other birds.

 

It was interesting watching the behaviour of the Rooks under the Rookery where a small café and benches are located. They are normally somewhat wary when on the ground but these birds have become habituated to the café customers and were very bold indeed begging food . There was even one bird that absolutely insisted on having its picture taken!

 

It was great fun being a bird guide for the day for Louisa but I wouldn’t fancy doing it for a living where the pressure to find birds for paid customers is so intense!

Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!