HOME
BEKI WATCH
Belted Kingfishers in Washington, Part 1: Inklings1
by Scott A. Richardson
Adapted from WOSNews 55 (June/July 1998): 3,7.
1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5
True or False? Male kingfishers winter further north than females. Male? Female? What's the Difference?
http://www.aves-specta.com/beki/richardson_1998a.htm
As I rummaged through six winters of bird data from Olympia's East Bay, I found an intriguing pattern. After completing hundreds of surveys, neither I nor other reporting observers had ever seen a female kingfisher during winter. Giving this some thought, I recalled reading in Natural History magazine about a similar kingfisher situation. A visit to the library verified my recollection: William Davis2 had written that all wintering kingfishers he saw in southwestern Ohio were males.
Gradually, I discovered other references to a winter sex bias in kingfishers. At Yellowstone National Park3: "The winter birds noticed have been males, the females not appearing until March 17." At five locations north of Lake Ontario4: "All...seen well enough to classify were males." At Fort Collins, Colorado5: 9 out of 10 kingfishers observed in fall and winter were males.
Yellowstone, Ontario, Colorado, Ohio--these reports all came from regions where open water freezes in winter. In contrast, William Davis had counted twice as many females as males when visiting southern Florida2. Consistently, when Jeff Kelly inspected Christmas Bird Count and Bird Banding Laboratory data from fall and winter, he learned that sex ratio varies with latitude5: proportionally, fewer females occur in the north and fewer males in the south.
I wondered about the situation in Washington. Do female kingfishers throughout the state, like those at East Bay, disappear during winter? In October 1997, I posted a request to Tweeters, asking that birders report their detections of kingfishers to me, noting sex whenever possible. I also asked for input through the pages of WOSNews. I promised to compile information and report back.
1998.12.10 | 2000.03.19