Kingfishers

A Belted Kingfisher in a typical setting

This species is most often seen on a prominent perch overlooking the water.

■ Kingfishers catch fish by “hovering” (but see this page) and then diving headfirst into the water. If you watch carefully when a kingfisher is hovering, you’ll see that the head remains stationary in the air, holding a fixed position over the water, while the wings flap, the tail adjusts, and the body shifts around, doing the work of flying. It’s important to hold the head steady so that the eyes can remain fixed on a potential target below, but the senses and the control involved in this are truly remarkable. The bird has to have an exquisitely delicate sense of air movement to anticipate how changing wind currents will affect its position, and an equally delicate sense of body position so that it can adjust wings and tail to compensate for air movements. And while the body moves around in response to wind and the wings and tail flap and flare to hold position the neck has to absorb all of the body movement instantly so that the head stays still. Imagine standing on a rocking boat and keeping your head at a fixed point in space—that is just one part of what the kingfisher is doing while it hovers. (See head bobbing in pigeons, this page.)

A Belted Kingfisher hovering

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■ Ecologists talk about the concept of limiting factors: that the overall population of a species can be limited by just one scarce resource. In the case of the Belted Kingfisher, that resource can be nesting sites. There are plenty of places with enough fish to feed a family of kingfishers, but for nesting they require the eroded face of a sandbank soft enough for the birds to burrow deep into it, and tall and steep enough to make it hard for predators to reach the burrow. As rivers and streams are dammed and channelized, the right kind of sandbank is getting scarcer, thus becoming a limiting factor in the population of Belted Kingfishers.

A Belted Kingfisher near its nest—the hole in the bank

Caught a fish . . . now what?

Birds have wings instead of hands, and use their feet for perching, so all food handling has to be done by the bill. Furthermore, they have no teeth (too heavy), so prey must be swallowed whole. Imagine if your hands were tied behind your back, and you had no teeth for chewing—how would you eat? Birds use their bill to manipulate their food, and then swallow it more or less whole, with the “chewing” stage happening in their muscular stomach.

A kingfisher holds a very wiggly fish crosswise in the bill, whacks it hard against a branch to stop it from wiggling, then deftly tosses it in the air, catching it by the head and swallowing it head first.