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June 8, 2022
“Mike, there’s three of them!” I yelled.
I was practically jumping up and down with excitement.
“No, I’m wrong! Five! There are five,
belted Kingfishers!”
I recall the first time I saw and identified a Kingfisher. We had been in our new home for about a year,
maybe two, when I noticed an unusual bird sitting on the old telephone line outside
our sunporch. A spikey crest, long beak, slate blue back and wings, and a white-collar around its throat made identifying the bird easy with a quick, google
search. The wings are edged with some
black and on the underside of the bird, beneath the white-collar, is a band of
blue before the belly feathers return to white once again. In this species, the female bird is larger
and more colorful. She sports a reddish-brown
(rufous) band across the upper part of her white belly which continues down her
flanks. The Kingfisher matures around twelve
inches in length and can have a wingspan of two feet. These birds are active and noisy! When not incubating their eggs (a task shared
by both the sexes), they are focused hunters who like to perch on high wires or
posts where they can closely watch the banks and streams for prey. Not only do they devour small fish but also amphibians,
crustaceans, snakes, and small reptiles.
They do not hunt silently. They
are perhaps the noisiest birds I have witnessed aside from caged, tropical
birds in large aviaries. They make a
loud, rattling sound that is almost constant whether they are at rest or flying
from point to point. This active and
noisy bird is hard to miss and the windows on the three sides of our all-seasons
sun porch provide the perfect place for me to sit and watch early in the
morning with a cup of hot tea as I write.
For several years now, I have only witnessed one Kingfisher. I’m not sure if the bird was solitary for
that long or if I was watching a mating pair that I just never happened to
catch together. I tend to think the bird
was alone because they are so easy to spot, but it could be that I just wasn’t
paying close enough attention. At any
rate, in late winter I noticed our resident Kingfisher had a mate. Later I watched as the two of them kept
making their way to a specific area along the banks of the stream and I assumed
they were preparing a cavity where the female could lay her eggs. For a while, I saw the two of them together
and then I saw only one, until after what seemed like a long time, there
I stood at the window counting FIVE raucous, belted, beautiful birds! I assume
the additional three birds are the offspring of the pair as they are slightly
smaller in size. What a delight it has
been to watch them busily calling, diving, and making occasional long flights
in a circular pattern through our mountain hollow, a path which takes them up
to the elm trees by the barn, back through the meadow where the chorus frogs reproduce,
and around once again to their perch right outside my windows.
How can one not be contented and joyful when living in such
surroundings?
