Mrs Kingfisher

Wow, what a morning!  We drove to Park Cameras in Burgess Hill to collect  the 300 mm F4 Pro lens that I borrowed when I did the Photography Workshop back in February.  You can only borrow the lens once, so this time we reserved it in Alan's name and in light of my shoulder issues I said that Alan could use it today, and I'd use my normal 75 mm - 300 mm.  As mentioned previously, as my camera is a x2 crop, the 300 mm is equivalent to 600mm, so perfect for wildlife photography.

We arrived at Wakehurst just before it opened at 10am and went to collect our permits to go into the Loder Valley nature reserve where I'd been told about the Kingfishers.  We were given a map and set off on a 40 minute walk - the nature reserve has a pin code to open the gate and once in there it was really quiet and peaceful, you wouldn't know it existed unless someone told you about it.  We finally found the Kingfisher Hide and there was just one other photographer in there, and she told us that she'd just seen the Kingfisher fly into the nest, so it was a case of sitting and waiting for it to appear again.  

We were really lucky as we saw the male arrive with a fish and he sat for a while with it in his beak until the female came out of the nest, he then proceeded to feed her the fish and after some time they both flew off.  We waited to see if they came back and eventually the male did, and after getting some more shots we decided to leave.

I'd taken a picnic with us, so we found a bench at the side of the reservoir and ate our lunch before heading back to the grounds of Wakehurst.  It's a lovely place and all the magnolias and rhododendrons were in bloom so it was a great time to see it, but of course seeing the Kingfishers made our day, neither of us had seen one before but always hoped to.

When we got home, we sat in the Palace with a bottle of non-alcoholic fizz and nibbles.  I'm still sticking with clean eating and although I will have a drink now, I keep it to a minimum and I'm pleased to say that the scales are still coming down!

My blip today is of the female which we now know is identified by the red colour on her beak, the male's is completely black.  And I can't actually take the credit for this shot as it's one that Alan took.  I've added a couple of others to my extras, including one with the fish.

I hope you're having a good weekend, I've got a little behind on comments again but I'll try and catch up tomorrow.