Do all kingfishers eat fish?

Week 46's colours are Powder Blue, Thunder Cloud, Sanguine Red & Parchment

“In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” — John Muir

I am having a bit of a break, we’re visiting family in South Africa and are currently spending time in a nature reserve in the beautiful Waterberg region.

Seeing animals with their young in the wild is always a treat, when they include both black and white rhinos it’s even a bit more fabulous! I’m sharing some of these photos below. To help curb the poaching of rhino horns, a new deterrent has been invented called Rhisotope. This involves adding radioisotopes to a live rhino’s horn which has two aims: to make the horn less ‘attractive’ (who wants radioactivity in their traditional medicine?) and to make the horns easily detectable at international borders.

However this is #coloricombo and doing a prompt about rhinos is a bit boring, so I went for something more colourful. Alongside the animals, there’s also incredible bird life around us. On the drive up we saw a Pied kingfisher and my brother-in-law photographed a Brown Hooded kingfisher which is the inspiration for this week’s colours.

Many people associate kingfishers with fishing but not all of them are interested in fish at all! Whilst the black and white Pied kingfisher has a unique hovering behaviour for hunting over water, the Brown Hooded kingfisher has a healthy diet of insects, small rodents, lizards, chameleons and snakes.

There are ten species of kingfishers in South Africa that fall into three distinct families: the Alcedinidae (river), Halcyonidae (tree) and Cerylidae (water).

Read more about the kingfishers of South Africa here and here.

‘Brown Hooded Kingfisher”. photograph, Willie van Heerden, 2025

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Powder Blue, Thunder Cloud, Sanguine Red & Parchment. Use the colours along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Please share this post with someone who likes colour and might like this weekly dollop of colour and creativity.

I love seeing what you create with the prompts. If you’re posting on Instagram, please tag #coloricombo and #estemacleod and join us in the private Facebook group Creative Prompts.

Dive into Blues

Make time for art, learn something new and feel inspired. In this thirty minute masterclass called Beautiful Blues I dive into the medium of aquarelle crayons and pencils using different blues.

Read all about it here and use the coupon code COLORIBLUE15 for a 15% discount off the listed price of £27 (so £22.95, around $31 or €26).