Forest Kingfisher

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Forest Kingfisher

We are very fortunate to have both the Forest Kingfisher and the Sacred Kingfisher living in the trees on and around our property. Just being able to walk out our front door and just take a couple of steps to be able to photograph these beautiful little birds in their natural environment is beautiful. Years ago we put a very shallow frog pond in the bottom corner of our yard, the rain runoff keeps it topped up with lovely cold fresh water. Yes we have frogs in their but because we just let it do what it wanted to do naturally it now has grasses and reeds and other vegetation growing in it. This provides shelter for the Buff-banded Rail chicks when they are hatched. I will do a post on these a little later. All this vegetation attracts lots of insects like dragonflies, butterflies, spiders, bees to mention a few, these attract the kingfishers and other birds and wildlife. Kingfishers eat insects and small reptiles

The Forest Kingfisher is 18-23cm in size their chest is mostly white except for juveniles which has a washed buff color on their lower chest. The Kingfisher
family contains 114 species and is divided into three subfamilies and 19 genera most similar species in Australia is the Sacred and the Collard Kingfishers. The Forest Kingfisher breeds from Sept-Jan and the female lays 3-5 eggs while the Sacred Kingfisher breeds from Sept-March and they lay 3-4 eggs. The Sacred Kingfisher is larger in size being 20-23cm
The photo below is of the Sacred Kingfisher and is not a good photo as I was just too far away but it does show the colors and how they both differ
But this Forest Kingfisher really cracks me up with his funny little antics but his look of sincerity is just beautiful. Their preferred habitats are open forests, woodlands, timber along water courses, farmlands, cane-fields,beaches and mangroves. We have 8 kingfishers in Australia and this is not including the 2 

Kookaburras the Laughing Kookaburra is the largest being 41-47cm, and the Blue-Winged Kookaburra being 38-40cm

You can clearly see the resemblance with this Laughing Kookaburra's beak being similar to the Kingfishers. Most kingfisher species are found in the tropical regions of Africa, Asia, and Oceania. I will do a separate post up for these adorable Kookaburras as well so keep an eye on this blog site. Amazingly the Bee-eater also belongs to the same family. Dedicated to all the Australian Fauna and Flora lost in the 2019/2020 bush fires

 


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