Royalty

Kingfisher female and male today, the female is the main and the male in flight is the extra - only my second extra of the year, I need to get a move on or I'll end up wasting them again :-)

The main shot is the more conventionally attractive of the two images, but very much the easier of the two to achieve.  The female is relatively accustomed to people now and you can, with care, get quite close to her. Certainly close enough fro this portrait.

The male on the other hand is considerably more cautious and is far easier to spook.  It would seem that the old Kingfisher male (that I first blipped a year ago to the day) did not make it through the Winter and this much younger male seems to have taken over patrolling the same territory. It may even be one of the brood he fathered last year.

Because he wasn't keeping so still I had a bit of a practice at trying to get him in flight.  The light was pretty poor this morning, so I'd been gradually playing with the shutter speed to get a more acceptable ISO setting when he decided to take flight.  Ideally I would normally have chosen to use something faster than 1/1250s but it just about worked out OK.  The background is way too busy and cluttered to make this a terribly pleasing image, but I was just pleased to have a shot of the bird in flight and coming roughly towards me.