Tough and hardworking
This deep into winter, it can seem a pretty bleak time to be thinking of birds. Spring is still a long way off; all the little migrant wonders we’ll enjoy so much then are currently down wintering in some warm, tropical place. It’s kind of like thinking of a fellow employee off to Hawaii on vacation about now – you’d rather not.
We have a fair number of tough birds that stick out the winter, though. I’ve had a pair of red-breasted nuthatches regularly visiting my suet feeder in the rain, the snow and the bitter cold. Despite the weather, I have to smile at their antics and admire their determination.
The Christmas bird counts are over now and there are plenty of good excuses for staying in out of the weather. So, instead of going out looking, let’s sit inside and contemplate one of those tough characters that stayed behind when all the Neotropical migrants left months ago. As I look through the results of various bird counts in our area, I have noticed there are always at least a couple of belted kingfishers on the list.
The Coeur d’Alene CBC, carried out mid-December each year, found two last month, has had at least one in each of the previous 16 CBCs and had 10 in 2002. Many kingfishers do migrate farther south in winter, some making it to northern South America, but a few find enough open, relatively shallow water to justify staying behind. In 2001 I even found a kingfisher keeping watch from a telephone line above an open ditch just off Highway 53 in Rathdrum. It was a shocker to see it there.
To me, though, it’s not really that much of a shocker that these hardy birds stay behind. They are the epitome of the New England commercial fisherman stereotype. Even their coloration fits with a bleakly gray wintry day, their tousled topknots fit with windblown hair, and their rusty chest feathers (female kingfishers) fit with salt-blown fishing boats.
And despite the weather, these hardworking fisherbirds are out there fishing for a living. Perched above an open bit of water, patiently awaiting the passage of a fish of the right size, or battling the wind while hovering over a spot where a moment before a suspicious shadow in the dark water betrayed its prey, the kingfisher is there, day after day. It’s got to be a rugged soul.
In fact, you could say that our belted kingfisher is in a group by itself. It’s in a taxonomic family and order by itself in our area. In southern Texas and in small areas of the Southwest there are two other kingfishers, the ringed kingfisher, in Texas only, and the green kingfisher, in Arizona and Texas. And it warrants its own group because these birds are so different from all other birds.
They are stocky, big-billed, big-headed birds with short legs and tiny feet – feet that are suited for only two things: perching and shuffling. They don’t dance and they don’t play cards, so I’ll explain their shuffle shortly. For the size of their double-crested heads, their bodies are disproportionately small, their necks are obviously short and their wings are relatively stubby.
They are, however, a distinctive slate-blue, and are rather attractive little (13 inches long) birds, in a pugnacious sort of way. Besides fishermen, they remind me of tough little dock workers with attitude sufficient to make up for their size. When alarmed, they have what is referred to as a rattle call that certainly gets your attention. And they keep it up as long as an intruder, whether human or beast, feathered or furred, remains within their fishing territory. Often their call is how you first locate a kingfisher.
Their rattle is both mechanical and strident, and amazingly shrill. It’s also quite complex, allowing for what’s described in avian linguistics as graded communication, letting kingfishers express various meanings in what to human ears is simply a rather irritating sound. Since kingfishers are primarily loners, they must be loudly muttering to themselves in various dock-side or wharf-side curses.
As their name implies, kingfishers are piscivores. It means they eat fish. They’ll eat other things too if they present themselves, such as crawfish, large insects, amphibians and reptiles, and even small mammals but they prefer fish. They require shallow and still water to spot their prey, and only a moment to crash-dive, with eyes shut, into the water to retrieve their prey.
They take small fish, usually four inches or less, that they swallow head-first. If you are yourself a fisherman, you know how wiggly a captured fish can be. To remove the wiggle, according to one ornithologist, “the fish is beaten senseless” before the kingfisher swallows it whole. Much like an owl does with bones and hair, kingfishers regurgitate a pellet of bones and scales. In fact, crumpled fish skeletons usually come out pretty much still resembling the fish they once supported.
One of the reasons I’d dwell on the kingfisher this time of year is in wonder of the summer home it builds. Part of the wonder is that I wonder why kingfishers that stay here for the winter don’t use these amazingly protected nest sites as winter dwellings as well.
Each spring, kingfisher newlyweds excavate a burrow in a soft streamside bank. Recall what I said about their basically nonfunctional feet. Even though they don’t work for walking, kingfisher feet have a fused pair of toes that serve perfectly in doglike digging. For as long as a week, a plume of dirt and sand can be seen flying from the construction zone. Then the birds shuffle back and forth packing the floor, leaving a furrow between their odd appendages.
The burrow is constructed horizontally, but slightly upward, to keep water out, and may reach six or more feet into the earth. At the end is a rounded nest chamber with a lining of somewhat used fish bones. It sounds homey. It is cozy. Despite the summer weather outside, the chamber maintains a fairly constant temperature. Thus my idea for its wintertime use as well. I wish that I could think of a way to insert that idea into the kingfisher’s evolutionary pathway. Perhaps genetic engineering could help.
Maybe the burrows are to much a mess to reuse. One author described a recently abandoned burrow as a “loathsome accumulation of excrement and putrefying food scraps.” That last part pretty well describes my son’s room.
Once the burrow is finished, kingfisher courtship is quite similar to human dating rituals. The male feeds the female a dinner and then they mate.
So, the weather outside is frightful, and the fire inside delightful (a month late, I know, but you get the idea), but there are tough bird souls out there making a living, biding their time until spring again returns North Idaho to a land of plenty. When that happens, you’ll already be thinking of the job that the kingfishers of this year’s breeding season have ahead of them. And I’ll still be wondering why they don’t keep those cozy burrows for use in the winter, too.