In November 2008, S K Foo was at the Panti Forest Reserve in nearby Johor, Malaysia to document a pair of Red-bearded Bee-eater (Nyctyornis amictus) feeding their chicks.
“…a larger species of bee-eaters. I would never dream of photographing this species as they are rather elusive, feeding mainly on insects and bees that are caught in flight from perches concealed in foliage. They were found in lower part of the forest as they were nesting. They constantly returned with food to feed their nestling(s)… including food that is not in their normal diet (like lizards) (left).
“That was also my only attempt to photograph these lovely bee-eaters because before my next visit to Panti Forest, the chick(s) has fledged and the adult bee-eaters have resumed to their normal habits… and perhaps feeding the chick(s) somewhere up on the trees.”
According to Fry & Fry (1992), these bee-eaters “keep mainly to the middle storey and lower part of the canopy, where there are gaps, allowing sunlight to penetrate, but they come to the ground to nest.” Their food is mainly insects, hawked in flight. These include cicadas (above), crickets, large beetles, termites, ants, wasps, hornets and carpenter bees.
We now add lizard to its list of foods.
Images by SK Foo.
Reference:
Fry, C.H. & K. Fry, 1992. Kingfishers, bee-eaters and rollers. New Jersey, Princeton University Press. 324 pp.
This post is a cooperative effort between www.naturepixels.org and BESG to bring the study of bird behaviour through photography to a wider audience.
Bird Ecology Study Group » Red-bearded Bee-eater taking a cicada
[…] a cicada comes from nearby Malaysia. His observation complements an earlier post by SK Foo that documented a bee-eater catching a lizard and a cicada. In that instance, at Panti Forest in Johor, the prey […]