22 thoughts on “Readers’ wildlife photos”

  2. a fantastic set of photos–really exciting to see the kingfisher concentrating before the dive and then see the catch.

  4. Just a guess but I suspect Stephen took more than a few shots here and then picked out the ones he wanted. To catch this action is really hard.

    1. I took quite a few shots, but the dive and the catch are all of a piece.

  5. It looks like it caught an insect rather than the expected fish. Were you able to ID the prey? Did it enter the water or grab it in the air? I’m expecting to see water droplets. Curious readers want to know.

  8. “my collection is in Chicago”

    As someone who has outlived many disk drives, I can’t help hearing this as “my collection is vulnerable to single-point failure”.

    May I suggest Dropbox or some other cloud-based backup system as a way of both protecting against disaster and making your collection accessible from anywhere.

      1. I’d suppose the University of Chicago has a good backup system. It would still be handy to put your data in the cloud, though, as Gregory Kusnick suggests, so you can access them them on the road.

        By the way, when I worked at NASA in the mid-90s they backed up everything on huge robotic tape silos. They were so big you could walk into them — they used digital tape cartridges that were accessed by robots. The latency for a restore was large (hours), and the capacity of each one was one terabyte. I have a two terabyte SSD on my MacBook Pro laptop now, the latency is close to zero, and I’m running out of space. 🙂

  11. very cool shots.. we have maybe a couple of breeding pairs around us, NZ kingfisher, kotare (Todiramphus sanctus) no breeding going on so not a lot of calling just hanging, awaiting a feeding opportunity perhaps.

    1. I have the misfortune of having possibly the least colorful and the spookiest kingfishers in the world.

Comments are closed.