Birds of Belize - Culinary Adventures

Birds gotta eat, and they exhibit all kinds of interesting behaviors when hunting for the food they like, whether insects, fish, or the juice of flowers.

  

 

Always fun watching woodpeckers poke and hammer to find their morsels.  Here a Pale-billed woodpecker, top left, a Golden-olive top right, and a Chestnut-colored woody, lower right.

 

 

 

Woodpeckers aren't the only birds to probe for insects; below, a White-necked puffbird has a feast of termites in this huge mound high in a ceiba tree.  

The Gartered trogon, right, is also eating termites, but only incidentally, as it's main task here is to carve out a nice comfortable nest in this mound for its expected brood.

Speaking of young, we watched this adolescent Osprey, below, cry to be fed, looking this way and that for its parent.  Maybe the successful fisher below right?

 

 

    

 

We saw many other water birds feeding in and around Caye Caulker, including (top to bottom) a Tricolored heron, Black-necked stilt, Roseate spoonbill, and Semipalmated sandpiper.

Not sure what nest this Great blue heron raided!

Always fun watching pelicans, Brown in this case, on their clown-like clumsy dives for fish ... but obviously they know what they're doing!

Maybe a Tennessee warbler (!) sucking nectar

We've rarely see a Trogon except sitting deep in the foliage of a tree, so we were surprised to find this Black-headed trogon, above, wrestle a caterpillar into submission.

Yellow-winged tanager with berry

 

At the Lamanai Mayan archeological site, we observed several Rufous-tailed jacamars hunting insects both in the air (male, left) and on the ground (female, below).   Check out this video of the male calling its mate while scanning for flying bugs.