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Azure Kingfishers eat most small aquatic things and if they seem to be preferring one fish to another, it is probably because that fish is around at the moment or easier to catch. They were semi-permanent residents near my backyard pond in Darwin years
ago and I saw them eat a number of different things.
AKs used to be seen quite regularly along Ginninderra Creek in Giralang and in what is now Nicholls before they cut the willows down all along the creek about 20 years ago. I am not taking sides in this but the willows were very attractive perching places
for AKs (and also, I might add, for those water birds that like to perch in trees like egrets, night herons, bitterns and so on). AKs used to make nesting burrows in the bank with entrances hidden by the willow roots. The ones I actually saw catch anything
were eating small yabbies.
Since the growth of shrubbery around the dam on Percival Hill I have seen them there (although I should specify that my reported sightings were not verified by COG). At the dam, the one I saw diving a couple of years ago was eating tadpoles.
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