The Kingfisher Heron

15th March 2022

We all know that Kingfishers fish by sitting quietly in a tree staring at the water below until they see a fish, and then plunge into the water head-first to catch the fish. We also all know that Herons fish by standing in the water peering down into the depths until they see a fish and then stab at it with their bill. Well, this Heron obviously hadn't read the manual because it thought it was a Kingfisher.

In this particular stream there are large shoals of  1000+ tightly packed six-inch Roach and the tactics deployed by the Heron was to stand on the bank of the stream and peer down at the water.

Then when it considered that the moment was right it would launch itself into the air and dive head first into the stream. I suspect that it wasn't targeting any one fish in particular, but just considered that if it crashed into a shoal of 1000+ sizeable fish it might just get lucky.

The problem is that once you have crashed into the water you have to get back to the bank which involved a lot of flapping large wet wings.

Well as you can see from this attempt the technique wasn't particularly successful, although it did catch a fish on one occasion. There must be easier ways of getting fed!!