Birds of India #59 – Small Blue Kingfisher

It is monsoon time in India and though wildlife photography during rains can be quite exciting, it does come with its own set of unique challenges like low and soft light, getting the shutter speeds, ensuring that one’s photo gear is protected and so on and so forth.

During one of our monsoon birding in India trips @ the Hebbal lake, on the outskirts of Bangalore, we got a wonderful opportunity to observe and photograph the Small Blue Kingfisher doing what it does best – fishing. It was raining and we knew that the low and soft light conditions was going to make photography very challenging. So we used a tripod to offset the problem to some extent.

It was an overcast morning and watching the Small Kingfisher make successful fishing dives was quite a birding experience. It was incredible to see it come up with fish on almost every dive. The low light conditions did not permit shutter speed more than 1/250s ensuring that we could not freeze the little fella in flight.

Here are a collection of images from that birding trip.