Kingfishers

While on holiday in Pembrokeshire, Wales I visited the Welsh Wildlife Centre at Cilgerran near the River Teifi. The Wildlife Centre building is a magnificent structure and won an architectural design award in 1993. The surrounding area is owned and managed by the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales and has numerous hides along many trails.





One of these hides is called the kingfisher hide. I have visited many hides before and have tried to photograph kingfishers on many occasions too. Most hides I have visited are great for viewing nature from a distance but rarely close enough to photograph anything.





On this occasion as I walked into the hide a young couple said 'your just in time he's posing for you.....', I couldn't believe my luck. There was a kingfisher only a few feet away sitting on a branch. I very carefully got my equipment set up and was extremely fortunate to watch this kingfisher catch a small fish, spend many minutes hitting it against the perch it was standing on before eating it, and eventually bringing up the pellet.


It was a truly magical experience and I used up a whole memory card. I decided to walk back to the car and get some more memory cards and to see if any of the family would like to come and see the kingfishers.




We all went back to the hide and waited for about 45mins before the others decided to go to the cafe after not seeing anything. I decided to visit some of the other hides but as there were a bunch of lads in canoes chasing birds along the river I gave up and went back to the kingfisher hide.











As I stepped into the hide I couldn't believe my luck as this time the male and the female were both there. I also saw some reed warblers, but they were a little way off. It was certainly a day I won't forget for a long time.

Female Great Spotted Woodpecker feeding its young

Male Great Spotted Woodpecker

As it's half term this week I am busy with my girls but I did manage to get up early and watch the Woodpeckers busily feeding their young (I will blog this later). I expect the young to leave the nest any day now so I decided to take my wife, our two girls and one of their friends to see the young being fed later on in the morning. My girls are only 3 and 5 years old so we only stayed for about 15 minutes. It was such a lovely time watching the girls enthralled by the male Woodpecker dancing through the trees calling to the young until finally feeding them.

The young sticking the heads right out of the hole to be fed and you can clearly see their red crests.






While I am up at the Woodpeckers nest and even while I had my whole family with me people walk right by without even noticing the Woodpeckers. The young are so noisy now and there is a constant barrage of noise from them that they can be heard from 50 feet away yet people walk right past without looking up. These same people will probably be glued to Springwatch next week on the television, when they show the Woodpeckers in their nest boxes, but they do not notice wildlife when it is all around them.