Changing direction just a little bit to show off a couple of the many, many birds of southern Africa. Today I am featuring the African Fish Eagle - closest relative to our American Bald Eagle - and three of the ten varieties of kingfisher in the area. In total we saw five different kingfishers but I was not able to capture the other two.
The African Fish Eagle is actually a little prettier than our bald eagle with his reddish brown plumage. The top photo was taken in Sabi Sands and the bottom shot was in Botswana's Okavango Delta. In the second shot this bird landed in the middle of a rookery full of storks, egrets, herons and ibis. The uproar was amazing but the eagle did not go after any of the baby birds before flying away.
This was one of the most beautiful kingfishers we saw - the Brown Hooded Kingfisher.
The three shots above are all of Africa's biggest species of these birds: the Giant Kingfisher. At 44 cm these birds are more than double the size of all the other kingfishers. We were lucky enough to come across a pond that had a number of the birds fishing successfully, including the mother/offspring pair seen in the middle shot.
The last member of the kingfisher family pictured is the pied kingfisher. This one was sitting in the papyrus plants as we went by in our boat.
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