Well, hot damn.

I just picked up a CD of bird calls (at long last), and the very second section compares the hairy woodpecker to the belted kingfisher. And damned if the kingfisher call wasn’t the chrk-chrk-chrk-chrk I heard from the mystery bird. I went and relooked, and yeah, male belted kingfisher had no crest (while in flight), and no red underbelly, and the big beak, (which wasn’t as bowed as I guess I was expecting) and they’re listed as making the call while they fly, which it did.

So I must have seen a male belted kingfisher! Dude! A lifer! Identified in part from the call! How cool is that?!

There’s three CDs worth of birdcalls. I strongly suspect I’ll just have to play these things over and over for months until they seep into my brain. My saturation point for heavy listening appears to be about one set worth of birds, but hopefully if I just pop it in whenever NPR bores or annoys me, I’ll eventually start hammering a few of these home.

Belted kingfisher! Man. Now I wanna see a female, which has all the red.