Ceryle rudis leucomelanura

Tipeshwar Wildlife Sanctuary & Ameenpur Lake, Telangana

Continuing the story of kingfishers from my earlier three part series featuring 9 species, A clique of Kingfishers, today I have another addition to that list of beautiful birds. The Kingfishers or Alcedinidae are a family of small to medium-sized, brightly coloured birds in the order Coraciiformes. They have a cosmopolitan distribution, with most species found in the tropical regions of Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The family contains 114 species and is divided into three subfamilies and 19 genera.

All kingfishers have large heads, long, sharp, pointed bills, short legs, and stubby tails. Most species have bright plumage with only small differences between the sexes. The kingfishers have a cosmopolitan distribution, occurring throughout the world's tropical and temperate regions. They are absent from the polar regions and some of the world's driest deserts. A number of species have reached islands groups, particularly those in the south and east Pacific Ocean. Most species are tropical in distribution, and a slight majority are found only in forests. They consume a wide range of prey usually caught by swooping down from a perch. While kingfishers are usually thought to live near rivers and eat fish, many species live away from water and eat small invertebrates. Like other members of their order, they nest in cavities, usually tunnels dug into the natural or artificial banks in the ground. Some kingfishers nest in arboreal termite nests.

A number of species are considered threatened by human activities and are in danger of extinction. The majority of these are forest species with limited distribution, particularly insular species. They are threatened by habitat loss caused by forest clearance or degradation and in some cases by introduced species.

Kingfishers are generally shy birds, but in spite of this, they feature heavily in human culture, generally due to the large head supporting its powerful mouth, their bright plumage, or some species' interesting behaviour. For the Dusun people of Borneo, the Oriental dwarf kingfisher is considered a bad omen, and warriors who see one on the way to battle should return home. Another Bornean tribe considers the Banded kingfisher an omen bird, albeit generally a good omen.

I have been able to photograph a few of these beautiful kingfishers from all across Asia Pacific with some coming quite easily and some coming after waiting for hours, damp and cold but worth every bit the wait. In A clique of Kingfishers, I featured 9 species, presented in three parts, some easily seen and some rare, threatened and critically endangered.

Continuing to add to that list I have here the Pied Kingfisher, a boldly marked black-and-white kingfisher with a short, bushy crest and a glossy all-dark bill. The pied is superficially similar to the Crested Kingfisher, but smaller, with a much more distinctly patterned head and breast and less erect crest. It is frequently seen perched in pairs or small groups - I am told there are two pairs at the location this specimen was documented. They often hover over water when seeking prey and like most they inhabit a wide range of waterside habitats, from lakes to estuaries to mangroves. I have seen them hovering so many places, so many times and not able to photograph that it is no longer funny. The closest was two pied hovering about 8 feet from me as I was in the middle of shooting a rather long long exposure, another was at a wildlife sanctuary while we were driving through and all the gear was packed in the boot. Anyway, I am yet to capture them hovering and I am hoping I will soon be able to do that with these resident birds but for now I have to be satisfied with what I have.

The first time I had seen these beautiful birds was at the Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary near Mandya in Karnataka in December 2011 - two pied sitting in very low light and all I had was the Canon 400d and a not very sharp Sigma 70-300 lens and we were in a boat. You can see those photos here & here. These were both edited on an iPad and I had a thing for frames and borders then :).

From then to now has been quite a journey.

The following video & photos are but a snapshot of the beautiful time spent with this kingfisher - one of the two subspecies seen in India. Also, I later realised, based on their markings, that I had captured different birds in the video and the photos. The video is best experienced in 4k for the exquisite markings on the feathers.

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Pied Kingfisher

The Pied Kingfisher (Ceryle rudis) is a species of water kingfisher widely distributed across Africa and Asia. They were originally described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758, and have five recognised subspecies.

Its black and white plumage and crest, as well as its habit of hovering over clear lakes and rivers before diving for fish, make it distinctive. The males have a double band across the breast, while females have a single gorget that is often broken in the middle as illustrated in the photo above. They are usually found in pairs or small family groups. When perched, they often bob their head and flick up their tail.

Status: Least Concern

The pied kingfisher was one of the many bird species originally described by Linnaeus in the landmark 1758 10th edition of his Systema Naturae, who noted that it lived in Persia and Egypt. He named it Alcedo rudis. The German naturalist Friedrich Boie erected the genus Ceryle in 1828. The name is from classical Greek kērulos, an unidentified and probably mythical bird mentioned by Aristotle and other authors. The specific epithet rudis is Latin for "wild" or "rude".

The pied kingfisher is the only member of the genus Ceryle. Molecular analysis shows it is an early offshoot of the lineage that gave rise to American kingfishers of the genus Chloroceryle. The pied kingfisher was initially believed to be descended from an ancestral American green kingfisher which crossed the Atlantic Ocean about one million years ago. A more recent suggestion is that the pied kingfisher and the American green kingfishers are derived from an Old World species, with the pied kingfisher or its ancestor losing the metallic colouration afterwards.

There are five subspecies:

• C. r. syriacus Roselaar, 1995 – Turkey to Israel east to southwest Iran (some ornithologists do not recognise this subspecies)

• C. r. rudis (Linnaeus, 1758) – Egypt and Africa south of the Sahara

• C. r. leucomelanurus Reichenbach, 1851 – E. Afghanistan through India to S. China & N. Indochina - seen in the video & photos here.

• C. r. travancoreensis Whistler, 1935 – southwest India

• C. r. insignis Hartert, 1910 – east and southeast China, Hainan Island

This is a medium-sized kingfisher, about 25 cm (9.8 in) long with a white with a black mask, a white supercilium and black breast bands. The crest is neat and the upperparts are barred in black. Several subspecies are recognized within the broad distribution. The nominate race is found in sub-Saharan Africa, extending into West Asia. The subspecies syriacus is a larger northern bird similar to the nominate subspecies (following Bergmann's rule). Subspecies leucomelanura is found from Afghanistan east into India, Thailand and Southeast Asia. The subspecies travancoreensis of the Western Ghats is darker with the white reduced. The subspecies C. r. insignis is found in Hainan and southeastern China and has a much larger bill. Males have a narrow second breast-band while females have a single broken breast band.

This kingfisher was photographed in the pleasant habitat of the Ameenpur Lake in Telangana. The reducing waters of the lake have created a small pond separated from main body of the lake by a mud bank. This “kingfisher pond“ is home to three different species of Kingfishers - the Pied. the Common and the White-breasted. If one is quiet and doesn’t move around on the mud bank all the three species come out to fairly close proximities and hunt and dive. It is a beautiful experience to see them go about their daily lives with a wary eye out for any movement. I have been here three times now and all three times I have seen varied behaviour from all three species. The first time there was a good bunch of people and lots of moving around and we saw the kingfishers a couple of times before they disappeared. The second time I was there on my own till fairly late in the morning and all three species came in close and perched, dived, pruned as normal. Once people started turning up and conversation started to flow they all disappeared. The third day was a repeat of the first with hardly any bird actually coming out into the open leave alone coming close.

It is unfortunate that the members of the reasonably well known local birding group are more interested in their social media presence rather than the actual bird and its behaviour. They have absolutely no interest in understanding how their noisy presence impacts the behaviour of the birds they are trying to photograph. They all call themselves “nature & wildlife lovers“ but from what I have seen of their various loud and egotistical members at various locations over various birds - all they are interested in is how many likes they get for a heavily cropped & poorly edited image of some bird they’ve shot. These are neither photographers nor birders nor are they interested in the wild habitats so rich in flora and fauna.

There was a time when I knew the founding members of this group. Those people were genuinely interested in wildlife and were also keen on improving their photography skills. Some of them today have become very well known and well established professional wildlife photographers and filmmakers. From that level of competence and skill to what I see of the group now it is a sad decline of what could have become a major influencer to protect the wildlife and habitat of this unique geography.

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