Starting a Family!
Kingfishers copulating
With male robins singing to attract prospective partners and blue tits intercepting other birds flying in to feed on the garden feeder, the signs are abundant that spring is here and breeding season is truly under way. Birds are becoming amorous day by day like this pair of kingfishers!
Fortunately, kingfishers’ status is green in the U.K. thanks to the improved water quality in rivers, streams, and brooks, as well as better habitat management suitable for their breeding. They dig nesting burrows in vertical river banks, ranging in depths from 60 to 90cm. Unlike some other birds known to make comfortable-looking nests with twigs, feathers, cobwebs, etc., they hardly use any ‘bedding materials’. They simply make a shallow dimple at the end of the burrow to stop their eggs from rolling off. Robert E Fuller, a wildlife artist, has a video of a kingfisher nest hole created inside the artificial sand bank he built so that we can see the life inside a kingfishers’ nest. If interested, you can watch the video from here.
For this reason, concreting river banks for reinforcement creates a serious problem for kingfishers as they cannot dig nest holes. Kingfishers can have more than one brood in one season, too, in which case, the flexibility to be able to dig another burrow as and when needed comes in handy. When you consider, however, that half of fledglings die within the first or second week of leaving the nest (parents only feed their fledged young for up to four days after which they are purged out of their territory), such flexibility isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity to maintain the kingfisher population. Even as adults, only a quarter of kingfishers survive from one breeding season to the next according to the RSPB.
So, the ones you have spotted by luck or by intelligent guessing, are the surviving select few so to speak, having successfully beat the competition and avoided predation. Such is the level of competition, kingfishers both male and female are solitary existence outside the breeding season, with an own territory to defend. If they spotted an opponent, they would certainly chase it away or if that didn’t do the trick, they would lock beaks trying to drown the opponent.
Given the usual temperament of kingfishers, it is then almost comical to see how two strange kingfishers try to make friends with one another for breeding purposes. This is where a good old bribing works really well, it seems. It’s called ‘courtship feeding’.
(Male) ‘Here’
(Female) ‘No, I don’t want it.’
Watching this pair’s courtship feeding fascinates me - a male approaches a female with fish in its beak. The female I was observing always pretends to be a little under the weather with her feather fluffed up, shy, and rather indifferent to the approach, turning her face away from the male even. Then the male inches closer to the female, with the fish head poking out of the tip of the beak. And all of a sudden, the sullen female flutters its wings excitedly, opens its beak and begs to be fed just like a chick. This is the first time I watched a kingfisher pair perform their courtship, so it would be exciting to see if there is any variation from one pair to another, especially if all females pretend to be indifferent initially!
‘There darling, it’s for you. Eat it.’
So far, the pair’s effort to start a family has gone well. They wash, preen, sunbathe, eat, copulate, then repeat the same thing over.
Once the female has laid eggs, then I shall see less and less of them as one has to be on the eggs all the time but I’m already excited to watch this young family develop. I’m convinced this is not going to be the last entry on Mr & Mrs Kingfisher. To be continued…..