African Pygmy Kingfisher

African Pygmy Kingfisher: The Royal Mile, Bonyoro, Uganda, August 2022 — One of my hopes for our visit to the Royal Mile (and if you did not read my post yesterday, you should check it out for more information on the Royal Mile) was Kingfishers! The Mile is famous among birders, among other things, for the frequency of sightings of the rarer Ugandan and African Kingfishers, including the Chocolate-backed…which is a bird I really want to see. You can probably guess from the tense in that sentence that I did not see it this trip…but I did get good looks a Kingfisher I had only glimpsed by chance in 2019, and added two new Kingfishers to my African Kingfisher list…and that despite the fact that the light remained poor all morning under the dense and very high canopy of the Bodongo forest. This is an African Pygmy Kingfisher…not all that rare a bird…but one I had only seen for a moment when no one else was looking (but managed a photo of) in the Botanical Gardens of Entebbe on my first Ugandan adventure. I was still delighted to see one sitting in the open along the Royal Mile. There were other Kingfishers calling there…both the Chocolate-backed and the Blue-breasted…but we had to settle for visuals of the Pygmy. Settle! 🙂 Sony Rx10iv at 600mm equivalent. Program mode with my custom birds and wildlife modifications and multi-frame noise reduction. Processed in Pixelmator Photo and Apple Photos. It was very dark, as I mentioned, so even with multi-frame noise reduction engaged the nominal exposures were at ISO 6400 @ f4 @ 1/200th and 1/160th. Plus .3EV. And I still had to use Pixelmator’s AI noise reduction to get acceptable images.

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