All species › Kingfishers, bee-eaters and rollers › Bee-eaters › Blue-Breasted Bee-Eater
Blue-Breasted Bee-Eater | Merops variegatus
Blauwborstbijeneter | Abejaruco Variegado
The Blue-Breasted Bee-Eater looks like an enlarged Little Bee-Eater with a white cheek patch and a dark blue breast band. It is a bee-eater of wet grassland, marsh edges and papyrus, occurring in the region only in Zambia and Angola.
Voice
A soft, high tsip or sip-sip, and a short trilling twitter between pair members. Like Little Bee-Eater, unobtrusive and easily missed among the sounds of the marsh.
Recording: Dries Van de Loock — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
About 19 cm, with a square, slightly notched tail lacking streamers. Upperparts grass-green, throat yellow, and a conspicuous white cheek patch below the black mask. Below the throat a broad, glossy blue-black to purple-blue gorget, followed by a cinnamon breast paling towards the belly. In the southern form found in the region a thin blue line runs above the mask. In flight cinnamon flight feathers with a black trailing edge and a rufous tail with a black terminal band. The sexes are alike. Juveniles lack the gorget and have a greenish breast.
Confusion species
Little Bee-Eater (Merops pusillus) is smaller, lacks the white cheek patch and has a narrower black rather than blue-black gorget; the two occur together, but Little usually sits in drier ground. Swallow-Tailed Bee-Eater (Merops hirundineus) has a forked blue tail and a narrow blue collar.
Habitat
Wet grassland, floodplains, dambos, the edges of papyrus and reed swamps and grassy lakeshores, usually near open water. It hunts from a reed stem, a low bush or a grass stalk for small flying insects. It nests in a tunnel in a low bank or a termite mound.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
In the region only in Zambia and Angola: in Zambia mainly in the swamps and plains of the north and west (Bangweulu, Mweru Wantipa, the Luapula and the upper Zambezi); in Angola in the north and east and on the central plateau. Beyond the region through Central Africa from Cameroon and Gabon via DR Congo to Uganda, western Kenya and north-western Tanzania.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
The Bangweulu Swamps in northern Zambia, where it sits in the grassland around the papyrus edges alongside Little Bee-Eaters. Scan the tallest stems above the grass; in good light the white cheek patch and dark gorget show at once.
Conservation status
Not threatened and fairly common in suitable habitat. Locally vulnerable to the draining and burning of marsh edges and the conversion of dambos to fields.
Scientific name
Merops variegatus | Vieillot, 1817
Vieillot described the species in 1817 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Merops was introduced in 1758 by Linnaeus. Merops is Greek and means 'bee-eater'. variegatus is Latin for 'variegated, many-coloured' — for the colourful plumage of green, blue, yellow and chestnut. The specimen the first description was based on came from Malembo, Cabinda (Angola).