It has been a wee while since I have been to the kingfishers at Pauatahanui, so today I thought I would give them a go when I got home from work. It was a bit windy and this made it very hard to keep my camera steady when I was shooting but I persevered. Shortly after I set up some nice gentlemen decided it would be a fine idea to go and look at the geese, so just wandered out over the mud flats scaring everything in sight and I very much doubt that he got to see much of the geese. What he did succeed in doing was to scare away the kingfishers.
About 30 minutes later I noticed the first kingfisher in the distance. I watched as it fed then disappeared off somewhere behind me. After about ten minutes it would return again and stay a bit longer. I got really excited when it stopped on the log in front of me, pity that the sun chose that minute to hide behind a cloud but I clicked away happily regardless. The first one was a youngster not fully into its adult feathers and thankfully not too scared of the silly lady hiding under a blanket!
While I was following the youngster I heard a noise to my left. I turned around and there was another slightly older bird watching me. I slowly turned the camera towards it and again clicked away. At this point I should tell you that I was shooting the entire sequence on manual focus with the tele-converter attached to the lens. I am hopeless at manual focusing, my eyesight is not the best and trying to manual focus on a specific point is more luck than anything else. I got lucky today! 
The second kingfisher was busy barffing up its left overs (or casting if you want the technical term) and as soon as that job was complete it was gone. I didn’t wait around for either of them to come back as I was really cold and ready for dinner. They will be there another day 🙂 
