……and so much more.  When I had been here in Cape Town two years ago I had visited Intaka Island Nature Reserve on several occasions hoping to photograph Malachite Kingfishers, I was almost successful but I hadn't got any "killer" shots.  I was disappointed then. In front of the public hide at this nature reserve, there are three perches which are used by the resident breeding  Malachites and it was then just a waiting game but they never did fly in then. This year it was different! I went yesterday….. incidentally my blog has been down and I couldn't post this yesterday evening…. I had been in the hide for just half an hour or so, it was around 1015, suddenly with a fanfare of calls, as is usual with kingfishers, there it was in front of me. It was a wow moment…only a word I have used about 3 times on the blog in 7 years!  I took the usual plethora of photos hoping that I was going to record a good pose. The light was incredibly bright and not very accommodating really but I think I "nailed it" as they say. The first bird that landed was a juvenile I think, then, an hour later, the fanfare was sounded again and in flew another and if I had to guess, I would say that this was one was an adult male,  (above).  The juvenile is the bird below, I am assuming that the dark on the beak is diagnostic of a young bird, it also had smokey markings on the red feet which the Common Kingfisher (laced athis) would have, but I am only guessing.

  This is a nice colourful bird but in this case, not as appealing to me as our European Common Kingfisher.  What is for sure though, this is a much smaller bird even smaller than a House Sparrow.