Fantail Delight
Today I was briefly visited by a beautiful Fantail. For those of you who were me a few months back and don’t know what a Fantail is; they are small insectivorous songbirds with a tail that looks like a fan.
I have a window-facing desk and would often see them on trees and admire them from afar. A few months ago also I was not curious or aware of them as a species. For me, they were just birds, until Darius, a friend who was over for lunch pointed them out and told me that his wife is a bird watcher and often spots these fantails. That intrigued me further and I’d often wonder why they don’t visit me.
The last few months have been a bit of a party for me when it comes to birds, with crows, mynahs, sparrows and pigeons frequenting my window for food and shelter. But the fantail visited me only a few times and one of those rare occasions was today.
Fantails have a tail that looks like a fan, a pointy beak, and are very energetic. Something like a hummingbird meets a sparrow. I love appreciating, talking about, and geeking out on wildlife. Apart from visiting the tree across my window, these beauties are found in and are native to Australasia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Most of the species are about 15 to 18 cm (5.9 to 7.1 in) long and are expert insect hunters. They have long tails; in some species, the tail is longer than the body and in most, the tail is longer than the wing. But you can’t always tell a fantail by its tail because when the tail is folded, it is rounded at the end, only when spread in display or while it’s foraging in air, its characteristic fan-shaped tail, that gives the family its name, is displayed. Its wings are tapered and hence they are not as fast as they are agile; making fantails highly efficient at catching insect prey. Most fantails, particularly the tropical or insular forms, are sedentary and undertake no migration.
Fantails are great hunters and deploy two general techniques to obtain their prey. The first is known as “static searching”, entails perching and watching out for aerial prey which it will then move towards and snatch from the air to return to perch to resume searching. The other method used is known as “progressive searching”, where the fantail moves through vegetation searching for insect prey. The movement of the searching fantail is like a shake down that flushes out hidden prey which is pursued and consumed.
Here is some trivia on these dainty darlings:
- Fantails are also called fan-tailed flycatchers.
- Though they are native to forest clearings, riverbanks, and beaches, some have become tame garden birds….the ones I see, I guess!
- Fantails are highly active birds, with several of the smaller species continuously on the move.
- Even when perched they continue to move, spin 180° on the spot, wag their tail from side to side, or fan it.
- In flight, they are highly agile and undertake highly aerobatic and intricate looping flights while using their fanned tail to catch insects in flight.
- They majorly eat small insects and invertebrates.
- Fantails frequently form associations with other species in order to obtain prey.
- Some species perch on the backs of cattle, which they use as a vantage point and also because the cattle flushes up insects.
- Fantails are often very bold around people and will approach them closely in order to capture insects flushed by them.
- Different species are also frequently found in mixed-species feeding flocks, traveling with other small insectivorous birds on the periphery of the flocks, and taking advantage of flushed prey.
- Fantails are territorial and aggressively defend their territories from other members of the same species, other fantail species, and other flycatchers.
- Within the territory the female selects the nesting site, these sites are often close to the previous year’s nest.
- Unlike humans, breeding responsibilities, nest building, incubation, and chick feeding, are shared between both sexes.
- Their nest is a small cup of grass stems that are neatly bound together in spider silk, which takes around 10 days to construct.
- Something very smart that a female fantail does is to appear to be injured to distract a potential predator to lure it away from the nest. While the female is pretending to be injured the male may continue to attack the predator. Despite this, fantails have a generally low nesting success.
If the fantail did not visit me today and hadn’t stolen my heart, I wouldn’t have dug out this information and written this article. Nature inspires.
