“Juvs,” the Missus calls them, which is what the bird books call juveniles for short.
They must be here for practice — usually they keep to the river bank, and The Boss can’t recall ever seeing more than one small one at a time, so it looks like a successful hatch.
All the more amazing, given the high river all spring, right into November.
The kingfishers mostly migrate from the north in early October, along with the dollar birds and the rainbow bee-eaters, to nest in the river bank.
They dig out burrows with their long, sharp beaks but, when they arrived in October, of course, the river was running a banker and The Boss reckoned the migrants might struggle to find suitable nesting sites this year.
Anyway, they may have delayed their nesting for a while but apparently it turned out well and, after the flood, the parents had plenty of insects, grubs, shrimps and minnows to feed to the youngsters.
It’s a perilous exercise for the birds nesting in the river bank, with foxes and feral cats always on the hunt — we often see feathers lying around the bush on our morning walks — so it’s a relief to see a healthy clutch survive.
The call of the sacred kingfisher is unmistakeable — a piercing, steady “ek ek ek ek ek” in four or five notes. They don’t dive into the river as often as their smaller cousin, the azure kingfisher, which spends most of its day perched on low branches along the river.
Another kingfisher cousin in Scotland dives more often and was famously captured by photographer Alan McFadyen, who finally nailed a perfectly timed shot of a kingfisher diving straight into a pond after six years of trying.
He said it took him around 4200 hours and 720,000 photos to get the bird at the right angle, diving straight into the water, in good light and without a splash.
Alan told The Herald Scotland that he would often go and take 600 pictures in a session without “any of them being any good”.
He was inspired to love nature and wildlife by his grandfather. “I remember my grandfather taking me to see the kingfisher nest, and I remember being completely blown away by how magnificent the birds are. So, when I took up photography, I returned to the same spot to photograph the kingfishers.”
Alan runs a wildlife photography business, https://photographyhides.co.uk, and you can seem more of his kingfishers there — or you could wander down to the Goulburn before breakfast one day, sit quietly for a while, and watch and listen. Woof!
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