Food for a kingfisher and a bee-eater

Posted by BESG on 13 December 08, Saturday
Contributed by Subaraj Rajathurai

“While surveying birds at Tuas recently, Sham and I had a few good observations. In nice sunny weather, birds were quite active. With the help of my lumix, I managed to snap some nice shots. This included two common, pretty birds feeding.

“One was the White-throated Kingfisher (Halcyon smyrnensis), a common resident of open country, feeding on a Garden Supple Skink (Lygosoma bowringii). The skink is a common, short-legged, worm-like reptile of gardens and parks. The kingfisher caught the skink and flew onto a chain, where it then proceeded to manoeuvre and swallowed the unfortunate lizard, while it was still alive. This was done within 20-30 seconds.

“The other was a Blue-tailed Bee-eater (Merops philippinus), a common migratory bird throughout Singapore, with a Decorative Tiger (Ictinogomphus decoratus) dragonfly. This dragonfly is a common, impressive species found around large and small bodies of water around our country. Despite the fairly large prey item, the bee-eater bashed the dragonfly and tried to swallow it. It then decided that a few more “whacks” were required. That was followed by the swallowing act that took only a few seconds.

“Always nice to be able to capture photos of bird behaviour, despite the limitations of my equipment.”

Subaraj Rajathurai
12th December 2008

Related Posts:

Blue-tailed Bee-eater and the dragonfly Lee Tiah Khee photographed a Blue-tailed Bee-eater (Merops philippinus)... Blue-tailed Bee-eater manipulating a dragonfly One of bee-eaters’ favourite food, or at least what... Oriental Dwarf Kingfisher with a skink in its bill Lena Chow videoed an Oriental Dwarf Kingfisher (Ceyx erithaca) with... Blue-bearded Bee-eater takes a carpenter bee Adrian Lim’s a.k.a wmw998 photograph of a Blue-bearded Bee-eater... Food of the Oriental Dwarf Kingfisher The nesting of at least two pairs of Oriental... Collared Kingfisher: Food for the chick YY Chong documented the variety of animal foods the... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Email Post

Categories: Bee-eaters, Feeding-invertebrates, Feeding-vertebrates, Kingfishers

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Anti-spam word: (Required)*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.