Beautiful Bee-Eaters

Friends hope you are following your passion on weekend and enjoying the same to the fullest, if not trust me you are missing something. We have passion in our soul but we are not realizing and even if we know because of the busy life we are unable to optimize it. Take out one day, run away from city life and try to follow your passion, it may be tracking, music, nature, photography, wildlife, singing or blogging anything, just spent a day with it and see the difference in you. Best of luck for the trail, I am sure you will feel refreshing.

So now let me come back to the topic for the day, from past few weeks we have been reading trip reports that offered me the best opportunities for photography as well as topics for my readers. Therefore, from these trips let me pull out a beautiful bird, which is none other than Bee Eaters. A lovely little bird with superb color combinations, so let us meet Green Bee-Eater here in the next section.

The Go Green Bird

Part of Bee-eater family also known as little green bee-eater is mainly insect eater bird majorly found in grassland, thin scrub and forest often quite far from water. Like other bee-eaters, this species is a richly colored, slender bird. It is about 9 inches (16–18 cm) long with about 2 inches made up by the elongated central tail-feathers. The color and pattern make this bird beautiful and photogenic, let me help you with a description so as you will get the idea. The entire plumage is bright green and tinged with blue especially on the chin and throat. The crown and upper back are tinged with golden rufous. The flight feathers are rufous washed with green and tipped with blackish, plus as a final touch a fine black line runs in front of and behind the eye gives the complete look and attractive for the frames.

Along with color pattern, the nature of the bird is such that all photographers get attracted towards it to make memorable frames. I have seen award-winning pictures of Bee-Eater on social media. Even I have experienced such a unique behavior of the bird in the wilderness. The habit is such that it will never sit at one place for a long time and will keep jumping here and there to catch insects or honeybee. While doing this activity if you are lucky and you have control over your gadgets well, you will turn truly a winner in this. So next time when you are on a trip ensure you get some lovely moments with you with this bird. Now, let us see some interesting facts of little champ.

The facts file

This elegant bird usually hunts low to the ground, making short swoops before returning to their perch. They sometimes perch on the backs of cattle or grazing antelope and make sallies into vegetation close to the ground to catch insects

Green bee-eaters "disarm" dangerous prey by removing the stinger and eliminating the venom by means of hitting and rubbing a bee against a branch

Green bee-eaters are insectivorous; they eat bees, Hymenoptera, bugs, beetles, termites, moths, and many flies. They also eat butterflies, crickets, dragonflies, caterpillars, and spiders

The Green bee-eater has a distinguishing predator-avoidance behavior, in that, if a potential predator looks at the bird’s nest, the Green bee-eater will not enter it until the predator looks away. This remarkable behavior shows that the bird is aware of what the predator is looking at, but also suggests an awareness of a predator’s mental state. This ‘theory of mind’ awareness is typically only part of human behavior and several other primate species

There are 8 subspecies of green bee-eater that can be found in Africa and Asia. Green bee-eater inhabits arid woodlands, thicket, plantations, lakesides and open grasslands

Green bee-eater is a natural-born killer of bees. Even juvenile birds that have never encountered bees in their life know how to perform this procedure

Bee-eaters may be killed by raptors; rodents and snakes raid their nests, and they can carry various parasites

Isn’t it interesting that such a little bird is having unique qualities that can very well help you to create frames? Even it is pleasant for sighting the way it catches bees, I hope you enjoyed the blog so now visit the DSLR to complete the journey for this week