The Rattling Kingfisher

by Kevin Strauss

If you hear a loud rattling sound in the air while boating or hiking along a river, you have probably entered the territory of the belted kingfisher (Ceryle alcyon). This foot-long blue and white bird has a spear-like bill and a spiky blue crest that makes its head look too big for its body. But the bird’s build all makes sense when it see it plunge headfirst into the river after a meal. It needs this build to help it survive its daily plunges into the water.

The kingfisher, one of our most colorful northwoods birds, has a blue head, back and wings and a white belly and neck ring. Usually, I see kingfishers sitting on branches or power lines over rivers, looking for a minnow or crayfish meal. Kingfishers have color vision, like we do, but they have more of a red oil in the cone cells of their retinas. That oil acts like a pair of polarized sunglasses, reducing the glare on a river and giving the bird keen underwater vision. It also explains how they can dive for and catch fish that I can’t even see from the surface of the river.

As their name implies, kingfishers fish for their food, mostly minnows, fingerlings and crayfish. When a kingfisher spots a fish near the surface, it leaps off its perch and hovers over the prey. It then dives headfirst at the target and if it is lucky, catches a fish or crayfish in its beak. The bird then flies back to a perch and swallows the prey.

Kingfishers don’t next in trees, preferring to burrow into an eroding bank for a nest. The male and female take turns flying into a spot near the top of a bank until they have dug a ledge with their beaks. Once they have constructed the ledge, the birds use their beaks like picks and their feet like shovels to dig a 3-7 foot tunnel into the bank, with a 10-inch wide nesting chamber at the end. The birds line the chamber with clean fish bones and scales. It can take the birds 1-3 weeks to dig the nest, so they have to plan ahead.

A kingfisher’s territory can range between 500 for an individual and as much as 5,000 yards for a mated pair. But the territory runs along a river, since kingfishers aren’t much interested in dry land. Their loud “k-k-k-k-k” rattling which they sound in flight or from a perch is how the birds ward off intruders in their territory.
So if you hear that rattling on a river, take a look around, you will probably see this “king of fishers” nearby.

The Ely Timberjay