There are kings among birds

By BILL CHAISSON
Of a Feather
I am fascinated by bird names because they preserve our opinion of a species. Some names are pejorative, registering our low opinion. Several European species of hawk, for example, are called “buzzards,” while in the U.S. we largely reserve this appellation for vultures. The name is derived from the Old French word “buisart,” which referred to a hawk species that was not used for falconry. If we have no use for an animal, we generally regard it as inferior to one for which we have some use.

Nothing says that you look up to a bird more than including the word “king” in its name. In the U.S. we have kingbirds, kingfishers, and kinglets. (In a couple of instances, king is used as an adjective to describe the largest or most ornate of a genus: the king eider and the king rail.)

I have always been fond of the eastern kingbird, the only species of this large flycatcher genus in most of the eastern U.S. While most kingbird species are some combination of soft green above and yellowish below, the eastern birds are dark slate-gray above and brilliant white below with a broad white band across the end of the tail.

It is the kingbirds that give the New World tyrant flycatchers their name; they are extremely aggressive and pushy and can often be seen loudly attacking birds many times their size. Whereas several crows must assemble to take on a large hawk or an owl, one kingbird will without hesitation fly up to confront a raptor that has innocently traversed the flycatcher’s territory. They have a shrieking PEE-tah, PEE-tah, PEE-tah call that they repeat five or six times in a burst as they attack, and they can be seen dive-bombing the targets of their enmity from above, even briefly alighting on the back to deliver a good peck.

Not surprisingly, they also defend their nests against all intruders, including humans, with snapping bills and whirring wings. There is also a visual component to the attack: a small tuft of red feathers remains unseen in the kingbird’s ragged crest until the bird is well and truly ticked off and it suddenly springs erect.

Kingbirds display a royal prerogative in other ways as well: DNA data has revealed that in addition to producing young with its mate, it is not uncommon for males to procreate outside the pair bond. They also take the defense of their territories very seriously. Encounters with other members of their own species may include knock-down, drag-out fights with the birds locking their feet together in flight, falling to the ground and pulling out each other’s feathers.

Kingfishers, on the other hand, are not called thus due to the aggressive tendencies of royalty. The name is purely a British and American one. In the Germanic countries they are called “ice birds,” and in the Romance-language countries, they are “fisher-martins” (martins being the squarer-tailed swallow species).

The origin of the Anglo-American common name is unknown, but it began as “king’s fisher” in the 15th century. The common kingfisher of Europe and the United Kingdom (and much of Eurasia) is a tiny, brightly colored bird, with a green-blue crown, back, tail, and wings and a brick-red chest and sides with the same color under the wings and in a streak behind the eye. The blue is flecked with white spots on the crown and wings.

Our own belted kingfisher is less considerably less flashy. Like the kingbird, it is slate-gray above (but bluer than the kingbird) and white below. Unlike the European species, the belted kingfisher has a prominent crest.

Kingfishers are hole-nesters, which obviates the requirement that females be less brightly colored than males. To wit, the female belted kingfisher has a prominent brick-red stripe across its chest and the female common kingfisher has a bright orange spot on its bill that the male lacks.

The center of kingfisher diversity is the Austral-asian region, and several of those species are described as “feathered jewels.” It is perhaps the garish appearance of most species that gives it its common name in English, with our conservative local species simply riding on the coattails of its Old World relations.

The kinglets’ name is more easily explained. They are a Holarctic family—found throughout the Northern Hemisphere—and are also called “crests” in the Old World. Crest means tuft or plume and the type species of the genus is the goldcrest; its Linnean name is Regulus regulus. “Regulus” means “petty king,” and kinglet is simply a humorous English literal translation (using the same construction as piglet or eaglet).

We have two species in the New World, the ruby-crowned and the golden-crowned kinglet. The latter is a bird of the coniferous forests, while the former is more generalized. That being said, the ruby-crown is the more northerly species, breeding only as far south as the White Mountains in New Hampshire, but seen as a spring and fall migrant elsewhere. The golden-crowned kinglet ranges south in the highest mountains—along the border of Sullivan and Merrimack and Cheshire and Hillsborough counties—down to the Massachusetts border.

The golden-crowned much resembles the four Old World species in having broad black stripes over the eyes and bright yellow or orange on the top of the head. The kinglets name is ironic; although they wear a fancy crown, they are only three to four inches long, smaller than sparrows or warblers or even chickadees. The ruby-crowned is the only kinglet to lack the obvious crown. Instead, like the kingbird, it has a shock of red feathers on top of its head that is only visible when the bird is excited. Unlike the kingbird though, the kinglet is excited by singing, not beating up other birds.

Bill Chaisson, who has been a birdwatcher since age 11, is a former editor of the Eagle Times. He now works for the Town of Wilmot and lives in Sutton.