The parenting peculiarities of White-throated Kingfishers

Come the monsoons -- or to be exact, come the weeks of intense humidity and heat that precede it -- cupid strikes the White-throated Kingfishers that are resident around the Buffalo Wallow (and of course, other places across Hyderabad and climatic zones similar to it) and they pair up.

While one can never know when and where exactly the birds get intimate, theirs seems to be a long courtship, extending across the fag end of April and all of May. There is courtship feeding, there is also a lot of flying into and out of tree canopies (these are after all tree Kingfishers), and stiff winged displaying on prominent perches.

 A nest, comprising a tunneled burrow is made in a mud-bank close to water (which in our case is the water of the Buffalo Wallow) and 3-4 eggs are laid. And then, with the wisdom ingrained in their DNA, and a prescience that's beyond our ken, somehow the eggs are hatched, right at the onset of the Monsoons.

All through the days when the Monsoons are still "coming", when the build-up comprises of overcast skies and light drizzles (mostly of the sneaky kind, in the silent watches of the night) the parent birds are active in turns, fetching a variety of grub -- grasshoppers, crickets, dragonflies and what look like cockroaches to the nests.

Both the birds also have a tendency to chill out, while on the job (which incidentally at times involves going into the nest and spending 5-10 minutes inside, in the abominable heat) by going hard at the water surface, Kamikaze fashion, in quick succession...and then preening leisurely.    

But in a way, its only when there has been a decent amount of rain that the activity of the birds seems to go up by a couple of levels, and the birds repeatedly bear -- on the basis of what I have seen across the last three seasons -- still-alive and writhing skinks to the nest.

Going by the pace at which the birds enter the nest and exit it, literally bolting out of it, one can easily get an idea of the fury with which the nestlings must be dismembering the skink -- a furious frenzy that any parent bird would be ill-advised to stick its beak in!

And, one can also assume that these are nestlings right at the threshold of fledging.

(Not that I have a very exact idea of how many days it is since the eggs have hatched, because it is almost impossible to document nests in the wild without interfering in the ways of nature...)

Which brings me to wondering -- how in the blazes do these birds estimate things so well?

              A parent White-throated Kingfisher with a skink catch.