(_Ceryle alcyon_) Kingfisher family
_Called also_: THE HALCYON
(Illustration facing p. 48)
_Length_--12 to 13 inches. About one-fourth as large again as
the robin.
_Male_--Upper part grayish blue, with prominent crest on head
reaching to the nape. A white spot in front of the eye. Bill
longer than the head, which is large and heavy. Wings and the
short tail minutely speckled and marked with broken bands of
white. Chin, band around throat, and underneath white. Two
bluish bands across the breast and a bluish wash on sides.
_Female_--Female and immature specimens have rufous bands
where the adult male's are blue. Plumage of both birds oily.
_Range_--North America, except where the Texan kingfisher
replaces it in a limited area in the Southwest. Common from
Labrador to Florida, east and west. Winters chiefly from
Virginia southward to South America.
_Migrations_--March. December. Common summer resident. Usually
a winter resident also.
If the kingfisher is not so neighborly as we could wish, or as he used
to be, it is not because he has grown less friendly, but because the
streams near our homes are fished out. Fish he must and will have, and
to get them nowadays it is too often necessary to follow the stream
back through secluded woods to the quiet waters of its source: a
clear, cool pond or lake whose scaly inmates have not yet learned
wisdom at the point of the sportsman's fly.
In such quiet haunts the kingfisher is easily the most conspicuous
object in sight, where he perches on some dead or projecting branch
over the water, intently watching for a dinner that is all
unsuspectingly swimming below. Suddenly the bird drops--dives; there
is a splash, a struggle, and then the "lone fisherman" returns
triumphant to his perch, holding a shining fish in his beak. If the
fish is small it is swallowed at once, but if it is large and bony it
must first be killed against the branch. A few sharp knocks, and the
struggles of the fish are over, but the kingfisher's have only begun.
How he gags and writhes, swallows his dinner, and then, regretting his
haste, brings it up again to try another wider avenue down his throat!
The many abortive efforts he makes to land his dinner safely below in
his stomach, his grim contortions as the fishbones scratch his
throat-lining on their way down and up again, force a smile in spite
of the bird's evident distress. It is small wonder he supplements his
fish diet with various kinds of the larger insects, shrimps, and
fresh-water mollusks.
Flying well over the tree-tops or along the waterways, the kingfisher
makes the woodland echo with his noisy rattle, that breaks the
stillness like a watchman's at midnight. It is, perhaps, the most
familiar sound heard along the banks of the inland rivers. No love or
cradle song does he know. Instead of softening and growing sweet, as
the voices of most birds do in the nesting season, the endearments
uttered by a pair of mated kingfishers are the most strident, rattly
shrieks ever heard by lovers It sounds as if they were perpetually
quarrelling, and yet they are really particularly devoted.
The nest of these birds, like the bank swallow's, is excavated in the
face of a high bank, preferably one that rises from a stream; and at
about six feet from the entrance of the tunnel six or eight clear,
shining white eggs are placed on a curious nest. All the fishbones and
scales that, being indigestible, are disgorged in pellets by the
parents, are carefully carried to the end of the tunnel to form a
prickly cradle for the unhappy fledglings. Very rarely a nest is made
in the hollow trunk of a tree; but wherever the home is, the
kingfishers become strongly attached to it, returning again and again
to the spot that has cost them so much labor to excavate. Some
observers have accused them of appropriating the holes of the
water-rats.
In ancient times of myths and fables, kingfishers or halcyons were
said to build a floating nest on the sea, and to possess some
mysterious power that calmed the troubled waves while the eggs were
hatching and the young birds were being reared, hence the term
"halcyon days," meaning days of fair weather.