Dan's Feathursday Feature: Belted Kingfisher

You’ve heard it before. Man meets woman; woman and man fall in love; man and woman wed; man dies a tragic death; distraught woman ends her life. Pass me a Kleenex.

Someone ought to write a play about that. Maybe a musical. Or a Greek myth.

Long ago and far away, Aeolus, ruler of the winds, had a daughter. He named her Alcyone. Alcyone fell in love with Ceyx, king of Trachis. They married and lived happily in their bungalow by the sea—too happily, by some accounts. Heady with the love they shared, they had the audacity to liken their union to that of Zeus and Hera, a comparison that did not appeal to Zeus.

One day Ceyx sets out to sea to consult an oracle at Delphi. (Yes, reader, I can hear you screaming, “Don’t board that ship, you fool!”) Never one to miss an opportunity to make someone’s life miserable, Zeus strikes Ceyx with a thunderbolt, sending him to the bottom of the Aegean. The god Morpheus then morphs into Ceyx and visits Alcyone to inform her of her spouse’s death. Overcome with grief and despair, Alcyone throws herself into the sea, where she joins Ceyx in death.

The lesser gods step in to clean up the mess made by the vengeful Zeus. They take pity on the hapless lovers and revive them by changing them into “halcyon birds”—Common Kingfishers. When the loving pair build their nest on the beach and begin to brood, Aeolus is so moved that he commands the winds to stop and the waves to subside for fourteen days so his daughter can care for her eggs undisturbed. That two-week period every year—one week before and one week after the winter solstice—when the eastern Mediterranean is generally quite calm, were known as the halcyon days.

Now you know how the goddess Alcyone got her name.

Some of the details of the story hint at the lack of any good birding field guides in ancient Greece. For example, though the Common Kingfisher can be found along the seashore, it is a bird more associated with inland rivers and small lakes. Also, it does not build the sort of nest that the average myth-listener might picture when hearing this story—a shallow depression in the sand, or a basket of woven grasses. Kingfishers build their nests by excavating cavities in steep riverbanks. But let’s leave aside the ornithological myth-busting for now and just recognize that this is a wonderful tale about a wonderful bird, and I have not been able to look at a kingfisher the same since I heard it.

Full disclosure: I have never seen a Common Kingfisher. It’s a bird of the “old world.” But that doesn’t matter. Old world, new world, land of the rising sun, land down under—worldwide there are about one hundred species of kingfisher, divided into three subfamilies, and all species share some common traits that make them easy to identify and excellent candidates for poor Alcyone’s resuscitation. They are colorful birds with a large, pointed bill protruding from an oversized head, tapering down to a pair of dainty feet that look almost quaint. I’m sure that if Alcyone had died in Papua New Guinea instead of the Peloponnese, the gods there as well would have chosen to turn her into one of the local kingfishers. The Sacred Kingfisher of the western Pacific would have been a perfect choice. Or maybe one of the Paradise Kingfishers, with their elegant tails.

Bringing it closer to home, if Ceyx had met his doom during a storm on Lake Michigan, and Alcyone had swum out to join him (throwing herself from the rocks of Park 566, no doubt), the gods certainly would have turned her into a Belted Kingfisher. It would have been their only choice. For other North American options they could head down to south Texas and Mexico to find the Green Kingfisher and the Ringed Kingfisher, but that’s just too much of a stretch even for a Greek myth.

Besides, who needs more choices when you have the Belted Kingfisher? I’m not sure there’s a better species of kingfisher to embody the spirits of Alcyone and Ceyx. Nineteenth-century taxonomists felt so, too. The Belted Kingfisher does not belong to the same genus as the old world’s Common Kingfisher, or even to the sub-family Halcyoninae, where over half the world’s kingfishers belong. But the North American cousin’s link to the gods was set in stone when it was given the species name alcyon. Megaceryle alcyon—the Alcyone of large kingfishers.

As kingfishers go, the Belted Kingfisher is not the most colorful, but I wouldn’t call it subdued, either. Perched on a snag overhanging a small woodland pond, its slate-blue back and contrasting white underside stand out in sharp contrast to the surrounding greens and browns. Its shaggy crest and large bill make me think of a Blue Jay with extra hair gel and a bill that decided to just keep growing. A swath of blue across the chest earns it the moniker “belted,” and in the female the belt bleeds into a rust-red breastband that stands out all the more next to the subdued blue of its back. The Belted Kingfisher is one of few bird species whose female is more colorful than the male. Thank you, Alcyone.

You’ll often hear the Belted Kingfisher before you see it. One of my favorite nature experiences is sitting near a small woodland river where I know a Belted Kingfisher hangs out. In the time it takes for three or four mosquitoes to find me—sometimes maybe a bit longer—I will hear the kingfisher’s unmistakable rattling call from somewhere upstream. Here it comes, barreling through the tunnel of trees, a yard or two above the flowing river, straight as an arrow, screeching like a McLaren at Monza. In a blue flash it zooms past, its rattle dopplering as it disappears downstream. Sometimes it will hit the brakes right in front of me and pull up for a pit stop on a branch overhanging the river.

If the gods are smiling on me that day, the kingfisher will look down at the swirling water below, cock its head quizzically, and then launch from its perch to shoot like a dart into the water. Before the splash even subsides, the bird propels itself up out of the water and right back to its perch, a three-inch chub scissored in its bill. With a couple sharp whacks against the limb where it is perched, the Belted Kingfisher convinces the squirming fish to allow itself to be swallowed. And then, with a loud rattle, the blue banshee swoops from its perch and continues downstream, rattling away.

There’s no doubt who is boss here. The bird and its mate have staked out a half-mile stretch of the river as their territory and, like Alan Ladd in Shane, they will defend it fiercely against intruders. Somewhere nearby there is a spot where the river carves into a hill, creating an exposed vertical bank. There the kingfisher pair will have excavated a narrow tunnel, two to eight feet deep into the bank, high enough above the water to stay dry even when spring rains swell the river, and sloping upward slightly, probably to prevent rainwater from running in. They take turns sitting on their clutch of five to eight eggs. While one tends the eggs, the other hunts for food and stands guard against intruding kingfishers or predators, like snakes, mink or racoons. Once the young kingfishers leave the nest and can take care of themselves, the mated pair split up and head their separate ways.

You’ll find the Belted Kingfisher all year round in most of the continental United States, as long as there is enough open water for their dive-bomber hunting method. In winter, though, they may not be quite as vocal, because they don’t have to be. Nesting pairs have split up until spring, and there is no longer the urgent need to defend the territory surrounding a fixed nest site. The raucous displays of bravado are more common in spring and summer.

Still, it’s not in the Belted Kingfisher’s DNA to be silent, so if you visit an unfrozen river, stream or pond even in the halcyon days of December, you might be graced with the rattle call of the Megaceryle alcyon. If you are fortunate to see a female, with rust-red breastband, recall how she got that mark. In the New World version of the tragedy of Alcyone and Ceyx, Alcyone throws herself into Lake Michigan and is dashed by the waves against the rocky crags of south Chicago’s Park 566, forever staining that forbidding shore a bloody red. Then, when the gods change Alcyone into a Belted Kingfisher they daub on her breast a drop of blood from those rocks, indelible testimony to a heart that was true.

Homer and Ovid are probably turning in their graves, but now you know how Park 566 got its red rocks.

Dan's Feathursday Feature is a regular contribution to the COS blog featuring the thoughts, insights and photography of Chicago birder, Dan Lory on birds of the Chicago region.