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By
Keith Diment
Sometimes,
but not very often, we see through our kitchen window a flash of
bright blue in the garden. "There's a Kingfisher!" exclaims
my wife while I run off to fetch the camera. I have tried keeping
the camera set up and ready but that's more effective than a scarecrow
in ensuring that nothing interesting ever happens.
So
I fetch the camera, remove its standard lens, attach the longer
one, switch on, remove the lens cap, look through the viewfinder
and discover that the bird has long since flown.
Just
this once, however, in early January, we were treated to a whole
hour's wonderful display by this little bird. I didn't even have
to go
outdoors!
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| Kingfisher
by Keith Diment |
A small
stream runs quite near the house and in winter it is less obscured
by plants so we can see what goes on more clearly. The Kingfisher
was incredibly patient. It tried a variety of perches, always concentrating
hard on watching the water. We know that we see lots of sticklebacks
an inch or two long in the summer but rarely see any at this time
of the year. Maybe we just don't bother to look in cold weather,
but then we don't depend on them like our feathered friend.
After
a good three-quarters of an hour, a flash of blue, a splash of water,
and there was the Kingfisher on a paving slab at the side of the
stream with a wriggling fish held sideways in its beak. It behaved
very much like a thrush with a snail, banging the fish onto the
hard surface until it stopped wriggling.
The
bird then turned the fish in its beak and swallowed it head first.
This is exactly what the bird books describe. The bird could not
swallow the fish tail first because the overlapping scales would
be pointing the wrong way. That looked to us like a pretty good
meal, but it clearly wasn't nearly enough. During the next few minutes
we saw the same performance repeated three more times.
Photography
For
anyone interested in the technicalities, the camera is a Canon 300D
digital SLR and the lens I used is a 55-200mm zoom at its longest
setting.
That
is equivalent to a 320mm lens on a 35mm film camera, so is hard
to hold still.
The
pictures are also cropped with only part of the captured image being
used. If only I had known that I had so much time available I could
have supported the camera on a tripod and avoided the camera shake
that is evident in most of the shots. With the bird flying around
as it did, however, I might then have missed some of the pictures
altogether.
The
light was not good. After a few shots I remembered that, being a
digital camera, I could increase the sensitivity, equivalent to
changing to a faster film, and switched from 200 to 800ASA so enabling
the use of a faster shutter speed. The photos were all taken from
indoors through double-glazed windows, and that too will have degraded
the results to some extent.
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