What happened before the click...Photographers tell their story behind a special picture. This time: a not quite common way of feeding birds
Taking photos of kingfishers is clearly not a simple matter. What can help is offering semi-natural feeding in an aquarium. That’s how this photo was taken. In late summer 2018, I set up a 60cm long aquarium in the shallow water of a redundant branch of the river Kocher. September is the ideal time to start this, when the young have left the nest and other kingfishers move in, so that there are as many different individual birds as possible in the territory. Next I put up my transportable hide on the riverbank of the old river course with a good view over the aquarium. From then on, I went over to the hut several times a week in the early morning and loaded the feeding site with white fish. Then it was a question of waiting.
Sometimes it can take hours for the first kingfisher to appear and provide a good subject for a photo. And so it was on this October day. I’d already hung on for several hours in the cold and damp, my coffee was all gone, and my feet had gone to sleep. In cases like this, I have a policy of lighting one last cigarette and when I’ve smoked that, if no kingfisher has presented itself, I go home. It’s not that unusual for the desired subject to appear at just that moment and so it was. The hunting flight of this female kingfisher under water only lasted one and a half seconds, but each time the sight of it is always a real experience that far more than compensates for all that effort and waiting.
Photo designer Bruno Dittrich has a long history with kingfishers. In the early 1970s he began constructing artificial supports for nesting for them at a time when these birds were very rare. Soon afterwards he began to take photos of these flying jewels. In 1975, he succeeded in taking the first photo in the world of a kingfisher diving underwater. Today Bruno Dittrich runs photography courses alongside his other activities. In these he also makes sure the next generation of photographers understand that our responsibility for nature does not end when the picture is in the bag.