Shot attached at Poayng Hu wetland in China. Followed these two common kingfisher for a while. There was an excellent perch which they ended up fighting for. The one of the left was quite dominant and attacked the right one quite badly and both falling into the stream below and struggling for a while. Have got a series of shots on this one conflict of theirs, but this one i liked most. Taken using Nikon D3S, with 600mm f/4 lens with 1.7x teleconverter. This is almost a 30%+ crop. I think it would look better with a little more exposure or fill-in and noise reduction. Cheers. Asif
Good to see Asif. Fights for resources like perches, nests etc are common but rarely lead to injury or death. It is not evolutionarily stable to follow a strategy of fighting to the death, for obvious reasons! In this image you can see the nictitating membrane covering the eyes of both birds as protection.
Last edited by John Chardine; 12-30-2009 at 09:10 AM.
Thank you John for the insight. It was very interesting to watch these folks. I did notice the change in eye color, but never realized that it was nictiating membrane covering the eyes for protection. Wow ! learnt something new here. I have one more shot that i would like to share, where they were making themselves look big to each other by spreading their wings in stand-off. Is there a name for such behavior ? Here it is.
Perch Conflict
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