Birdwatching - 3307 🐦

🦉 The common kingfisher (Alcedo atthis)

• Alcedo alcedinis, alcyon, or halcedo, halcedinis (lat.) kingfisher; word "hals" in ancient Greek language meant "sea", along with the word thalassa. According to ancient Greek mythology Alcyone (Alcyone), the daughter of the wind god Eol, was the wife of Keix, who drowned due to the wrath of the gods. Alcyone, out of grief, threw herself into the sea, and also died. The gods had mercy and turned the spouses into kingfishers. Looking for her husband, Alcyone calls all the time “Keix! Keix!" and dives, trying to find him in the sea. Alcyone days - two weeks of calm weather around the day winter solstice. During these days, Eol pacified the winds so that Alcyone, in the form of a kingfisher, could hatch chicks in her nest floating on the waves.
• atthis (ancient Greek mythology) Attis, a divine youth of extraordinary beauty

Every year in the same place! In early May, I always go to visit these colorful fishermen in the ravine where they always make their home. They dig their burrows in the sheer sandy cliff wall. A stream flows through this ravine, and bushes and thickets grow, carefully hiding their home. But not from me.

When their nestlings grow up, they spend all their time near this place at a pond. There, the parents teach their children to fish. And after a month, they fly off to a "training ground" along the river, where a small, fast-flowing river flows into a large, slow one.