Kingfisher

When I started filming at the Patuxent several years ago, I was hoping to be able to capture good quality images of birds. It didn't take long to realize that wasn't going to happen. Although I had the latest camera, that wasn't enough to get the kinds of images I was hoping for. In addition to a camera body, you also need a good quality lens. And they are not inexpensive. We're talking several thousand dollars. Unless you are making money with your images, it is hard to justify that kind of expense.

Take these images, for example. They are not of very good quality, but you can see that it is a kingfisher with a tiny fish in it's mouth. It was taken with a fairly expensive, though slow, lens on a tripod that doesn't even have a brand name on it (made in China) and a pan head which is not recommended for taking photographs of birds.  Camera magazines are always touting the use of a gimbal head (more than $500) for use in bird photography on a nice sturdy tripod ($300 and up - not including the head). Wouldn't that be nice!

I had to find some other way of taking images if I was going to continue, so I developed my own technique for using a pan head to take photographs of birds in flight using that cheap tripod until I was able to take sharp images more often than not. If you look at this photo, for example, the quality isn't good, but the bird is sharp. That means the technique was adequate, but the lens was the limiting factor.

Another thing I discovered while filming birds was what they were doing was of such interest that getting high quality images didn't always matter. I'm not saying I wouldn't like to have high quality images. But even if I wasn't able to capture them, my low quality images were depicting behavior that was interesting in it's own right.

One thing I don't like about Kingfishers is the little white spot on their head that gives the illusion of being their eye at this distance. It always looks as though they have dead eye because you have blown out the eye with too much camera exposure.

I have lowered my standards somewhat when I go to film on the river. I may take (I hate to admit it) three or four hundred images, but I am happy if I come away with one that I feel is superior to the rest. I don't always take that many but if something interesting is going on, believe me, it is not hard to do. A high-speed burst can produce six images just like that.

So when I see something like this series in which a kingfisher catches this tiny little minnow on the other side of the river and expends all this energy to fly all the way across the river to a dock on the other side, what do you think I should do?  Just watch?  Or take images even though I know they aren't going to be worth much?

And so, because I continued to film this incident, I learned that a kingfisher will sometimes beat the crap out of a little fish to subdue it so that it can swallow it.  And now, you have learned that too.

Kingfishers have been particularly difficult to take photographs of.  They are fast, they're wary, and they seldom land any where close to where I am.  In five year or six years, this was the only time one landed close enough to get halfway decent images. Note the white spot forward of the eye.  It is thought that this spot actually has a function in helping the bird successfully catch fish.