I was just nipping back from depositing a small part of our egg mountain with our friends across the road last week, when something odd flew across the drive – something I’d never seen at our place before.  It turned out to be this guy – a sacred kingfisher.

I don’t know why I was so surprised to see a kingfisher here, a kilometre or more and a couple of hundred metres up the hill from the creek.  Possibly because I do regularly see these lovely birds on my paddles in the Hawkesbury – hunting in the mangroves lining Milson’s Point; regurgitating pellets in full view of the expensive holiday homes in Calabash Bay or this young ‘un, hanging out near the public wharf at the questionably named Dusty Hole.

Juvenile sacred kingfisher by Berowra Creek

Though I have repeatedly spotted them in bushland far from decent stretches of water, I managed to convince myself that they were fishing in the local tiny, slightly fetid pools.  But of course, ten minutes of googling gave me the correct answer.  Unlike the smaller azure kingfishers – the sacred mostly eat terrestrial prey – insects, skinks and even sometimes small birds. They rarely actually eat fish: there should be some kind of by-law, right?

Azure kingfisher chilling out in the winter fog

Our visitor hung out for quite a while in the neighbours’ backyard, giving me the chance to race off for my camera and get into a possibly compromising position with my zoom lens propped up on the fence, pointing in the general direction of their living room windows.  The kingfisher was certainly aware a stalker was watching him from the bushes but didn’t seem too fazed.

“What are you looking at? Stalker!”

After my efforts to create bird habitat over the last few years, I felt a bit jealous that this gorgeous creature was choosing to hang out in our neighbour’s back garden.  However, I have to reconcile myself that their densely-planted native garden has the low shrubs these birds like to perch on while they’re waiting to dive down onto their prey in the leaf litter, without the loud woodwork projects, inquisitive chickens, trampoline and horde of neighbourhood kids that ramp up the action in ours.

A wing stretch from our visiting sacred kingfisher

Sacred kingfishers are surprisingly mobile it seems.  They are the only kingfisher in these parts that is migratory.  Many (though not all) of the birds that live in the southern parts of Australia migrate each each to north Queensland and PNG – it’s a partial migrant like most other Australian migratory birds. I suspect that the local sacred kingfishers – or at least some of them – hang around in the winter.  Peter and Judy Smith (2012), keeping tabs on the arrival dates of migratory birds in Blaxland in the lower Blue Mountains, for over 30 years never saw a sacred kingfisher in the winter, but I’ve seen a couple on the Hawkesbury in the colder months – hanging out in America Bay in April and basking in the late afternoon light by Berowra Creek in July, right in the middle of winter.  Or “winter” as my British friends like to call it.

Sacred kingfisher in April in America Bay

An overwintering sacred kingfisher in Calabash Bay

When I visited Wellington a couple of years ago I was surprised to see something very familiar hunting in a suburban park. A sub-species, Todiramphus sanctus vagans, that looks very very like our locals lives in New Zealand/Aotearoa as well.

The New Zealand kingfisher

I started speculating on how the sacred kingfishers got over the Tasman but it seem their range is less about being blown off course on migratory treks than the epic distribution of another bird to which it is closely related – the collared kingfisher .  It’s a one less frequently seen in Australia – found only on coastlines in the northern half of Australia – and never seen at all by me so no pics. I got nothing!  Collared kingfishers (sometimes called the mangrove kingfisher) seem to be less generalist than the sacred, favouring mangroves and the forests immediately behind them – but has an impressive range.

In an article offering a genetic analysis of this species and its descendants in Australia, New Zealand and various Pacific islands, Michael Andersen and his colleagues describe as it as “the most widely distributed of the Pacific’s ‘great speciators’. Its 50 subspecies constitute a species complex that is distributed over 16 000 km from the Red Sea to Polynesia” (Andersen 2015).  The sacred seems to be one of the species that evolved from it.  Intriguingly collared kingfishers are no longer a migratory species, but Andersen speculates that “the migratory nature of T. sanctus is an evolutionary vestige of the ancestral Todiramphus lineage still exhibiting the colonization phase” (Andersen 2015).

One way or another, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the sacred in our neighbourhood.  After all, I’ve always known you can witness sacred on the water, or in the forest, or in the suburbs.  Not everywhere, but in more places than you would think – as long as you remember to look.  In this case – in the bushes.

Further References

Andersen, Michael, Hannah T Shult, Alice Cibois, Jean-Claude Thibault, Christopher E Filardi, Robert G Moyle (2015) “Rapid diversification and secondary sympatry in Australo-Pacific kingfishers” Royal Society Open Science Feb 2(2)

Debus, SJS (2007) “Avifauna of remnant bushland on the Twee Coast of Northern New South Wales” Sunbird 37(2)

Lindenmayer, David B. , Michael A. McCarthy, Hugh P. Possingham and Sarah Legge (2001) “A Simple Landscape-Scale Test of a Spatially Explicit Population Model: Patch Occupancy in Fragmented South-Eastern Australian Forests” Oikos, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Mar), pp. 445-458

Loyn, Richard H., Edward G. McNabb, Phoebe Macak, Philippa Noble (2007) “Eucalypt plantations as habitat for birds on previously cleared farmland in south-eastern Australia” Biological Conservation 137 533–548

Smith, Peter & Judy Smith (2012) “Climate change and bird migration in southeastern
Australia” Emu – Austral Ornithology, 112:4, 333-342