I had seen British kingfishers before but never managed to photograph one until we moved to Suffolk, where the kingfishers which lived along the ditches that drained the Deben's marshes allowed me to approach to fifty metres - any closer and they flew away.
They are stunning birds, with nothing else in Britain to match them for their colours, but if only, in the times I visited Tanzania, I had paid more attention to the bird life there, I would have realised how rich that country is in kingfishers.
The first we saw there was....
....the malachite kingfisher, a small bird which must win first prize for its finery. We also met....
....the mangrove kingfisher which, with the malachite, inhabited the mangroves that lined the coastal rivers and deltas.
Found, surprisingly, away from water was the brown-hooded kingfisher, while....
....the pied kingfisher, which fished along the beaches, was the least excitingly coloured but....
....by far the most numerous.
There are no less than eleven species of kingfisher in Tanzania. Of these, I saw perhaps six. If only I had been a little better prepared for our Tanzania safaris, I would probably have seen more.
Sadly, we have no kingfishers in our part of Scotland.
I like the pied kingfisher's speckled appearance. Lovely photographs Jon. I looked on a UK map of kingfisher inhabitation and there are many confirmed sightings inland from Inverness. Keep looking along the Golspie Burn, you might be lucky and able to report a sighting to the RSPB.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your kind comment, Derryck. I wish we had kingfishers here. Until last winter at least we had a pair of dippers but we haven't seen them in months. Oh dear, the state of wildlife here is increasingly and depressingly dire. Jon
DeleteBeautiful photos.
ReplyDelete