king fisher

   Kingfishers are a group of small to medium sized brightly coloured birds in the order Coraciiformes. They have a cosmopolitan distribution, with most species being found in the Old World and Australia. The group is treated either as a single family, Alcedinidae, or as a suborder Alcedines containing three families, Alcedinidae (river kingfishers), Halcyonidae (tree kingfishers), and Cerylidae (water kingfishers). There are roughly 90 species of kingfisher. All have large heads, long, sharp, pointed bills, short legs, and stubby tails. 

    Most species have bright plumage with little differences between the sexes. Most species are tropical in distribution, and a slight majority are found only in forests. They consume a wide range of prey as well as fish, usually caught by swooping down from a perch. Like other members of their order they nest in cavities, usually tunnels dug into the natural or artificial banks in the ground. A few species, principally insular forms, are The kingfishers were traditionally treated as one family, Alcedinidae with three subfamilies, but following the 1990s revolution in bird taxonomy, the three former subfamilies are now often elevated to familial level. That move was supported by chromosome and DNA-DNA hybridisation studies, but challenged on the grounds that all three groups are monophyletic with respect to the other Coraciiformes.

 The tree kingfishers have been previously given the familial name Dacelonidae but Halcyonidae has priority.

The centre of kingfisher diversity is the Australasian region, but the family is not thought to have originated there, instead they evolved in the Northern Hemisphere and invaded the Australasian region a number of times. Fossil kingfishers have been described from Lower Eocene rocks in Wyoming and Middle Eocene rocks in Germany, around 30-40 million years ago. More recent fossil kingfishers have been described in the Miocene rocks of Australia (5-25 million years old). Several fossil birds have been erroneously ascribed to the kingfishers, including Halcyornis  from the Lower Eocene rocks in Kent, which has also been considered a gull, but is now thought to have been a member of anextinct family .

     The kingfishers have a cosmopolitan distribution, occurring throughout the worlds tropics and temperate regions. They are absent from the polar regions and some of the world's driest deserts. A number of species have reached islands groups, particularly those in the south and east Pacific Ocean.

     The Old World tropics and Australasia are the core area for this group. Europe and North America north of Mexico are very poorly represented with only one common kingfisher (Common Kingfisher and Belted Kingfisher respectively), and a couple of uncommon or very local species each: (Ringed Kingfisher and Green Kingfisher in the southwest USA, Pied Kingfisher and White-throated Kingfisher in SE Europe). The six species occurring in the Americas are four closely related green kingfishers in the genus Chloroceryle and two large crested kingfishers in the genus Megaceryle. 

     Even tropical South America has only five species plus wintering Belted Kingfisher Individual species may have massive ranges, like the Common Kingfisher, which ranges from Ireland across Europe, North Africa and Asia as far as the Solomon Islands in Australasia, or the Pied Kingfisher, which has a widespread distribution across Africa and Asia.

    Other species have much narrower ranges, particularly insular species which are endemic to a single small island. The Kofiau Paradise Kingfisher is restricted to the tiny island of Kofiau off New Guinea.

King fisher bird