Thousands of hours have been spent, along waterways hoping to see the flash of electric blue that can only mean one thing, a kingfisher. These birds are probably the most colourful in the UK and way up there in the worlds prettiest of birds. They are found all across Europe, some parts of northern Africa, south and central asia and as far east as the Solomon islands near Australia.
With a wingspan of 10 inches and weighing around 37grams, kingfishers are about the same size as a house sparrow. Both sexes have mottled blue heads, wings and tails, orange cheeks and undersides and metallic aqua blue rumps. They have a white chin and white ear patches and it is the colour of their beaks that allows adult birds to be sexed from a distance. Males have all black beaks whilst the females have orange most of the way along their lower mandible.
It is very rare to see a kingfisher away from water where they are mostly found along freshwater streams, cannals, slow flowing rivers and lakes. They can also be seen, especially in the colder months when freshwater is more likely to freeze, around coastal estuaries, marshland and harbours. As their name alludes a lot of their diet is made up of small fish which they usually catch by diving from a branch and snatching from the water. They can sometimes also hover above the water and then dive in if there are no suitable perches nearby. Once they have grabbed their prey, they then bring it back to a perch, and bash it on the head to stun it before swallowing it whole, almost always head first. Alongside fish, they will also take newts and tadpoles and occasionally aquatic invertebrates. They are very efficient hunters successfully catching more than 50% of the time when they dive from a perch, although this does drop to just 20percent when they dive from a hovering position. Kingfishers need to eat around 60% of their own bodyweight every day, so they are quite territorial over their stretch of water, especially before winter when feeding up is even more important. To help them with being accurate when they plunge into the water, kingfishers bob their heads to gauge the depth and they have a long, narrow and pointed bill. Scientists in Japan found this bill to be so aerodynamic they actually based the design for the front of their high speed bullet trains on the shape of a kingfishers head.
When it comes to nesting, kingfishers are very secretive. They begin to court one another by presenting gifts of food from February onwards and once a pair is formed, both birds will start to dig a nesting hole. This consists of a tunnel around 60cm deep into a sandy bank, usually overhanging water. No nesting material is used and once the tunnel is complete the female will lay between 5 and 8 glossy white eggs that measure just under an inch in length. These are incubated by both parents for 19 to 21 days until they hatch. At first the chicks are featherless and blind but with both parents bringing a ready supply of fish throughout daylight hours, the chicks can grow really fast, sometimes being ready to fledge at just 24 days old. If there isn’t much food around this fledging can be slowed down and in some cases it takes the chicks as much as 37 days to fledge. For the young birds it is very important to be ready once they leave the nest as their parents will only feed them for four days afterwards before they not only stop feeding them, but also chase them out of their territory. For the adults, time is of the essence and they will hurriedly get down to laying the next batch of eggs. Each year a pair of kingfishers will raise 2 or 3 clutches of young.
#kingfisher #birds #nature
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