Windows are one life’s greatest inventions. If you have ever driven at more than 20km/h in a game drive vehicle, you will know. Dung beetles flying straight into your face are no fun, kingfishers flying into your office windows..twice.. is, well just as bad!
I’m no bird fan. My relationship with them over the years has been an interesting evolution and serious of strange events. Obviously because I don’t care all that much I’ve seen some of the rarest ones around, which makes all my birder friends upset. They don’t hide away the fact that I don’t deserve such sighting, I just stick my tongue out at them. Haters gonna hate.
Over the past few years they have come to grow on me, mostly because I broke up with a boyfriend that was obsessed with them. Don’t get me wrong, he was a superb birder but he didn’t know how to teach me how to recognize them or how to get into the world of “that black bullet flying was a “(insert random bird name)”. I think he didn’t get me, which is probably the main reason why I said ba-bye to him and birds for a long time.
Now, I’m better at birds and slowly but surely letting that competitiveness against them take over. I will ID them… until it’s too hard and I get bored. But hey! My list of birds I can recognize has grown – partly thanks to Tristan who gets birds and gets me. Having said that, there are around 500 species of birds alone in the Kruger area – this may take a while.
I’ve always liked owls, vultures and kingfisher – of which there are plenty around the Kruger Park area. That’s why when this tiny little gem of a bird flew into my window twice, I ran out in hope that he would be fine!
This is a little Pygmy Kingfisher. The tiniest of them all and because of that, it deserves all the love. This little one however, it’s also a tiny little lie. It may be called a kingfisher; truth is, like some of its other kingfisher cousins, it rarely eats fish. Mind blown.
It feeds mainly on insects and some small vertebrates on occasion. Because of its diet it then migrates from the warm places within Africa and arrives back to us around September-October until summer fades away.
Pygmy here was fine. A little bit concussed ,it took a while for it to come back to its senses. He seemed to enjoy my company for a little while and then dumped for a guest’s hat before deciding wild was his best colour. He flew away, and next time I saw him he kept away from the windows.
