Gray-Headed Kingfisher

One of the issues in dealing with unfamiliar birds is that nuances are lost in the similarities. This happens to me quite a lot, but was particularly true with the woodland kingfisher and the gray-headed kingfisher. I saw a woodland kingfisher (last post) near the entrance to the Mabamba Swamp. I couldn't remember the name of it, but recalled it had a bright bill, some gray, some turquoise and some black. While taking the riverboat cruise from Paraa to Murchison Falls and back on the Victoria Nile in Murchison Falls NP I saw another kingfisher that looked a lot like the woodland kingfisher and I conflated them together. Later that day as our guide William stopped toward the end of the bridge over the Victoria Nile to look at birds, I got another (better) view of the same kingfisher. Yesterday as I was looking for my photos of the woodland kingfisher, I kept looking at my photos from Murchison Falls NP, where I was sure I'd photographed some, but couldn't find them. I'd gotten to the point where I was going to look in my deleted photos, then discovered the photos I was looking for under "gray-headed kingfisher." Mystery solved. 

The male of the nominate race, which I saw, Halcyon leucocephala leucocephala, has a gray head, and grayish-white breast; black lores, back and wing coverts; turquoise wings, rump and tail; and a rufous-orange bill, belly, legs and feet. 

Illustration of gray-headed woodpeacker, ssp leucocephala, from Birds of the World. 

The nominate subspecies is found from Senegambia east to Eritrea and Somalia, south to Gabon, northeastern DRC, the Lake Victoria basin (including Uganda, where I saw it), and northern Tanzania. There are another four subspecies which I won't detail. 

Range map from Birds of the World.

Wikipedia notes that it is a dry-country kingfisher of scrub and woodland, often found near water, but not aquatic. It perches on a branch, watchingthe ground for signs of insects or small lizards. It notes that it looks similar to the woodland kingfisher, but the woodland kingfisher lacks the orangish belly and has greater coverage of the turquoise feathers on the back.