An Old Friend Returns (Along with some of the usual suspects)

A female kingfisher with a recently whacked fish.

The dark bands on the female's breast make the kingfisher one of the rare birds where the female is more colorful than the male.

Male kingfisher showing off his uncolorful breast.

The rose breasted gross beak waits for the purple finches to finish at the feeder. (Click on the photo to get the enlarged version.)

The gold finch waits on the purple finches to finish at the feeder. Notice a pattern here?

Last year we had a pair of banded kingfishers who took turns perching on the dead tree that overlooks our pond and a stretch of the river. It was pretty exciting to watch them dive into the pond and return to a branch with a fish. Then they would unceremoniously whack the fish on the branch to kill it before devouring it in one big gulp. I guess the kingfisher doesn't like for the fish to squirm as it slides down the bird's gullet towards oblivion. Anyway, we had started to despair of seeing the kingfishers this year since we hadn't had any sightings. Then they showed up a few days ago, forgoing the fish in the pond and hunting up some frogs along one bend in the river. They are large and beautiful birds with colorings similar to a blue jay. They are a bit larger than a jay however. Oddly enough kingfishers nest in mud banks along a river as opposed to in a tree. Most kingfishers live in warmer (read tropical) climes and there are many species worldwide. I'm even seen a couple on my trips to Benin, Africa. There's just the one species up here in the North Country, however, and we're glad to have them. They need to start cleaning out some of the over sized minnows in the pond. The minnows have been gorging on the food supposedly destined for the trout and some of them are now approaching the size of small tunas.
In other bird news, we appear to have 4 pairs of mating purple finches, a pair of mating goldfinches and a pair of mating rose-breasted grosbeaks in the woods right around the house. We surmise this because they show up at the feeders almost every day. I say "mating" pairs, but in all honesty we haven't gotten back their responses to the Kinsey survey so who knows what their coupling arrangements are? As soon as we get the surveys back, I'll post the data to the blog.