After many, NO\u00a0dozens of visits to the Fen hide at Titchwell and enviously looking at the days sightings\u00a0board\u00a0only to see that earlier in the day kingfishers had made an appearance.<\/p>\n
I finally managed to visit on a day when one was allegedly making regular visits, so there was at last a chance of getting some good views and possibly some images.<\/p>\n
Although, with the winter sun still low in the sky the fen hide casts a long shadow over one of the perches that might provide the best shot and I guess the news had spread as the hide was the most crowded I\u2019d seen in a long time.<\/p>\n
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Settling down for a long and I have to say chilly wait, we had only just set the camera up and I\u00a0caught a flash of blue against the background of reeds, landing right in-front of the hide on the perch,\u00a0we were then treated to two hours of the kingfisher doing what they do best catching fish after fish (four in total, small roach I think) I thought we might be looking at two birds feeding but on closer examination it was the same bird, perhaps feeding up ready for breeding.<\/p>\n
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Another birder\/photographer in the hide commented that the female kingfishers had been seen a couple of times already which got me wondering how he knew it was a female. \u00a0A little bit of research on the RSPB community site <\/a>on our return and I found that someone had posted the answer\u00a0in that the sexes are very similar, the main difference being the colour of the lower mandible: the male\u2019s bill is all black while the female\u2019s is black with red on the lower mandible. Looking back at some images I had taken on another occasion that I got a close look at a kingfisher at\u00a0 Sculthorpe Moor I now can see that at that time we were looking at the male.<\/p>\n Male kingfisher taken at Sculthorpe Moor Nature Reserve<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/p>\n