I make no apologies whatsoever for including yet again, more Kingfishers. I am just fortunate at the moment  to have this female KF with me, I am spending some quality time with my new "best friend". Come next week or sooner, (or hopefully later), she will have moved on and I will be concentrating my efforts on another species. But this week, and untill it ends, it's Kingfishers.  

July is a great month, even if the weather is a bit dodgy it's usually still reasonably warm and today was like that. Overcast and a bit rainy at first but not bad enough to keep me out of the hide. I'm glad I made the effort because she was with me after a short wait, appearing in the viewfinder with another massive minnow. She really can handle these big fish, just compare it's length to her body, that's one big fish for her to deal with.  The male that we had with us for so long over the Autumn and Winter made a big deal about dealing with large prey. Not this bird, she just manoeuvres  it until it's head first and down it goes. Today, after a big breakfast she flew to the opposite side and sat there for at least half an hour to let it "go down". When I first saw a Kingfisher last September, here on the brook, I dreamt of getting a good shot with a fish. Now if its not absolutely perfect, sharp and doing nothing but posing,  it gets binned. This morning I took a couple of hundred photos and deleted 75% but most of them were good, it's just impossible though to keep 300 pictures every day.

Getting a kingfisher in flight is the 'holy-grail" to me. I almost did it with this picture above, she is just lifting off. A split second later would have seen a perfect image.  She was actually flying off to bath and then I photographed her on this next perch which I think is a lovely image.