I like this guy, but I can’t say I like his eating habits. This White-breasted Kingfisher (Halcyon smyrnensis) sat on a branch hanging over the edge of a swamp in Bharatpur and kept darting down to the water and coming back to its perch. This is one of the species of Kingfishers which does not live by fish. It mostly eats insects, although it isn’t finicky. About one sixth of its diet consists of vertebrates, perhaps occasionally other birds.
I was curious about what it was eating now, and I had a new camera. It wasn’t hard to get a series of close ups. What was that it had picked up? Was it a water strider? The legs were long, but the body was even longer. Probably not a water strider then. Also, it hadn’t darted down to the surface, but had snatched up the morsel of food from the air. Could it be some kind of an Orthoptera, a grasshopper or cricket? The body was rather thin. Its wings, if it had any, were folded. I wished I’d seen its head and antennae.
A bunch of field biologists found that H. smyrnensis spends about half of the day scanning its surroundings for food, and only about a quarter of daylight hours actually feeding. It seemed to me that the time spent in feeding was less. This Kingfisher did not give me much of a chance to continue my differential diagnosis of its diet. The long-bodied insect was gone in a jiffy. Was the process of eating over? Apparently not. The tongue of a White-breasted Kingfisher is a marvelous organ, well-adapted to its diet, breaking down its hard shell slowly while it sits and scans the surroundings for the next morsel.