![\"dsc05845\"](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/DSC05845-1024x768.jpg\")
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Am I the only one who wakes up on the plane at the end of\u00a0a transoceanic\u00a0flight completely, entirely, thoroughly, almost irretrievably discombobulated?<\/p>\n
I stumbled out of the Venice airport this morning fully disoriented. Happily, the time it took me to walk the ever-widening circles required to find the car rental area was also the opportunity for the first of the day’s many score\u00a0pygmy cormorants<\/strong> to fly over — and with that I was on my ornitho-feet again, reminded that I hadn’t landed just anywhere in Old Europe, but was on, indeed in<\/em>, the Adriatic Sea.<\/p>\n I spent the day re-familiarizing myself with the area and the birds, and even got to witness two\u00a0common kingfisher\u00a0<\/strong>behaviors I never had before. I suspect that neither is rare, but it’s unusual that I get to linger over this bird, so often just an electric-blue flash and a nails-on-the-chalkboard squeak as it darts past on its way to one end or the other of its necessarily linear territory.<\/p>\n Today, though, I watched two different individuals hunting the “lagoon” at Lio Piccolo, a tiny insular peninsula or peninsular island with a single road so narrow that I could swear a time or two I was propelled merely by the rotation of the axles.<\/p>\n In any event, my slow progress was a chance to watch one kingfisher actually hovering over the water for a couple of seconds; it was less skilled than so many of the\u00a0larger aquatic alcedinids are, but I was still impressed, especially since this was the first time I think I’d ever seen the species treading air at all.<\/p>\n Not long thereafter, I was more surprised to see a blue dot on a distant telephone wire: a common kingfisher, hunting from a perch far higher and far more exposed than I would ever have expected. Twice the little blue dart flicked its way down to the water, but twice it came up empty, no doubt to the amusement of the\u00a0great cormorants\u00a0<\/strong>hulking on the wires and poles around it.<\/p>\n![\"dsc05833\"](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/DSC05833-1024x768.jpg\")
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