Birds and Birding's Guide to:

Watching THE ROLLER-LIKE BIRDS

THE ROLLERS AND THEIR ALLIES

THE KINGFISHERS

Habitat  of the Kingfisher

The members of this family are distributed, though somewhat unevenly, throughout the entire world except in Arctic and Antarctic regions. Their center of distribution according to Wallace is the eastern half of the Malay Archipelago, from which point they decrease rapidly in numbers, Australia possessing but thirteen species and the entire New World only about a dozen. This last statement, as Wallace adds,”leads to the conclusion that America long existed without Kingfishers; and that in comparatively recent times — perhaps during the Miocene or Pliocene period — a species of the Old World genus (Ceryle) found its way into North America, and, spreading rapidly southward along the great river valleys, has become differentiated in South America into the few closely allied forms that alone inhabit that vast country — the richest in the world in fresh-water fish, and apparently the best fitted to sustain a varied and numerous body of Kingfishers."

The Kingfishers are birds of classical renown and many are the legends and myths concerning them, as attested by the following extract from the pen of Mr. Alfred Newton, the talented English ornithologist: “The Kingfisher is the subject of a variety of legends and superstitions, both classical and mediaeval.

Of the latter, one of the most curious is that, having been originally a plain gray bird, it acquired its present bright colors by flying toward the sun on its liberation from Noah's Ark, where its upper surface assumed the hue of the sky above it and its lower plumage was scorched by the heat of the setting orb to the tint it now bears. More than this, the Kingfisher was supposed to possess many virtues.

Its dried body would avert thunderbolts, and if kept in a wardrobe, would preserve from moths the woolen stuffs therein laid, or hung by a thread to the ceiling of a chamber would point with its bill to the quarter whence the wind blew. All the readers of Ovid know how the faithful but unfortunate Ceyx and Alcyone were changed into Kingfishers — birds which bred at the winter solstice, when through the influence of /Eolus, the wind god and father of the fond wife, all gales were hushed and the sea calmed so that their floating nest might ride uninjured over the water during the seven proverbial ' Halcyon Days.'“

At first blush it may seem a far call from the typical fish-eating Kingfisher to a great fruit-eating Hornbill, and so it is, but the piscivorous Kingfishers undoubtedly represent the extreme degree of differentiation attained by any members of the family, while the most ancient types are apparently with equal certainty represented by the great Laughing Kingfishers (Dacelo), which in food, habits, and structure as well, are seen to approach most closely to the typical Hornbills. While no actual connecting links are perhaps known, it appears well authenticated that the Kingfishers and the Hornbills and their immediate allies, the Hoopoes, must have had a common ancestor, though granting that it was at a relatively remote period.

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