A Belted Kingfisher has a long-toed salamander over for dinner. You can read more about Kingfishers here at my "Wild & Free Montana" website. Behind the lens. I was shoulder-deep in water, photographing ducks from a modified float tube that lets me get the camera down at water level. When this Kingfisher landed behind me, I suddenly realized that my rigging didn't allow me to easily point the lens upward. I muscled the lens up to captue this image, and now I'm redesigning my float tube.
A male Pileated Woodpecker inspects an old feeding hole in a weathered stump. The red mustache distinguishes the guys from the females.
A female Pileated Woodpecker flies low over a shaded winter snow bank. Both males and females sport crests of red feathers, and the males also have a red mustache. Behind the lens. There's more to the story of this bird. She's missing her central tail feathers ("retrices"), which is normal when the bird is molting. But when I showed this photo to my neighbors, they said, "We know that bird!" She was feeding at their suet feeder when a squirrel ran up the tree to chase her away, and a few feathers were seen floating to the ground after the altercation. They said that the strange thing is, the squirrel never eats the suet.
