Usually a kingfisher will find a nice high perch from where it can spot prey in the water and make a fast dive to capture it. The other day I watched a pair of females use a different method. They were spotting fish while flying and diving in from on wing, then getting back in the air and repeating it all over again. I'm not sure if they were unsuccessful in catching a fish and so they would keep trying and, thus, racing around some more.
Females have a rusty-colored band around their undersides making it easy to sex one. I have seen both males hanging together and females hanging together. I have always assumed they were related. I don't think they would tolerate one another otherwise. I also saw a family of four one time all traveling together.
You can see they are not half-way about diving in. I did notice on one occasion that a kingfisher had modified it's dive to very shallow because the tide was low where it was diving into the water. So, they do have sense enough to be careful and not break their neck.
None of these images show it, but they were feeding on a school of fish that very much looked like silver dollars and were about the same size. I happened to catch one or two with the camera as they jumped out of the water.
The cormorant in the last photo seemed to be watching them with keen interest.
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