My White Whale
For about a year, I’ve been going to Huntley Meadows Park (aka, Fairfax Disney for its graveled trails, packed boardwalks, and the incessant machine-gun flutter of millisecond shutters) in search of a belted kingfisher. I have seen kingfishers before and watched them diving for fish not ten feet away from me at a lake in Tanzania — those were the brilliantly-colored malachite kingfishers — and they have been my favorite birds since. Here we have belted kingfishers, but they’ve all managed to evade me, until today. I was walking across the boardwalk, dodging children with sticks and birders with $13,000 lenses (see the picture below), when I heard the distinct “mechanical rattles” of the kingfisher out over the pond. The birders were all looking the other direction, photographing some mergansers like usual, and the families seemed preoccupied with keeping their small children dry and on the boardwalk. Of course, it was a grey and foggy day (my usual excuse for my bad photos), and he was probably over a hundred yards away, but for about fifteen minutes I watched as the kingfisher perched on a branch, jumped off and performed his signature hover over the pond, and then dove into the water, coming up with a very small fish in his beak.
This would be as close as I could get to him, before he flew off across the pond to do his fishing.
Here he is, beginning his fishing. The distance — about 100 yards or more — means the pictures aren’t fantastic, but the story can still be told.
Just above the water, he hovers to get a bead on his target.
Into the water he goes!
Shaking out his feathers. You can only just barely make out the fish in his beak.
Another not-so-great picture.
My new fixed focal length lens means it’s much harder to take inconspicuous pictures of the other birders, but I did manage to sneak this picture of one man’s lens. Or at least the hood for his lens. That lens is a Canon EF 600mm f/4L IS III USM Lens, checking in at a cool $12,999 — though I bet if I had that bad boy my white whale/kingfisher would be a whole lot clearer.
But I didn’t only see my kingfisher on this morning. I also followed this little guy around: a brown creeper. They hop vertically up trees, usually passing nuthatches hanging upside down going the opposite direction.
Here’s an easily misidentified bird: the yellow-bellied sapsucker. I heard him hammering away in a quiet corner of the park, and it took me a few minutes to spot him. You can see all the holes he’s drilled into this tree looking for sap.
And of course a trip to Fairfax Disney wouldn’t be complete without a mascot spotting: the great blue heron.