A couple of weekends ago, I headed out to Westerly Park, to see what birds I could find after a break from that location of some 4 months. Soon after arriving, I found several Western Kingbirds. Many of these were immature or juvenile birds that had been busy hunting bugs. There were about 2 or 3 birds perched in one of the trees close to the trail.
Kingbirds are flycatchers, so they perch on branches until bugs and insects fly past. Periodically they take flight to catch some insects, so I decided to wait and see.
This bird made several flights to catch insects. Maybe I would be lucky to capture some of the in-flight action?
After several attempts, I managed to capture a flight sequence. First, as the bird took flight, below.
Once in flight, flycatchers have very erratic flight patterns as they attempt to capture insects.
It proved to be difficult to capture a flight sequence, because flycatchers have extremely erratic flight patterns. However, I did manage to get a few shots.
Altogether, there must have been at least a dozen Kingbirds along the creek. After a few more attempts with these 2 or 3 Kingbirds, I decided to make my way to another part of Westerly Creek. Here I found a few Snowy Egrets that were wading along the shore. I had been watching this Egret, when it turned and started to walk in my direction. It had spotted a Crawdad at the edge of the reeds.
And then caught the creature.
I captured several images as the Egret was meandering around the shore with its catch.
After manipulating the Crawdad in its bill, the Egret walked along the shore to my right.
Maybe I could capture the Egret swallowing the Crawdad?
No luck. There were more bushes and reeds at the side that obscured the Egret from me. No worries, I had a great afternoon seeing some different kind of bird behavior at Westerly Creek.