Southeast Asian blue-throated bee bees nest in Minjiang River basin. What do you know about this bird?

In early summer, in a small village on the outskirts of Nanping, eight photographers hid in a small bamboo shed covered with black shading cloth and waited with long guns and short guns. They braved the hot and humid weather above 30℃ just to catch a bird flying in the Minjiang River basin.

At first glance, the name is a bit strange. There are bees and tigers, but it is a bird. Bee tiger likes to catch all kinds of insects in the air, which means bee buster, hence the name.

The blue-throated bee tiger has gorgeous feathers, which are not inferior to any kind of birds. Its top and back are bright chocolate, its throat is particularly eye-catching, and its waist and tail also have bright feathers.

Every summer, the blue-throated bee tiger enters the breeding season. In this small battlefield around Nanping, the blue-throated bee tiger enjoys the clear stream and the sand by the water. In the next two months, it will complete courtship, nesting and childbirth here.

Chen Lin, a famous ecological photographer and vice chairman of Fuzhou Photographers Association, has more than 10 years of experience in bee and tiger photography. He said that it is rainy in summer in Fujian, and sometimes a heavy rain causes the water level of the stream to rise, which directly rushes into the nest of the bee tiger, and the chicks die in a cruel environment.

Many villages in Nanping and Sanming have swarms of bees and tigers, and there are more than 20 bees in this battlefield. The owner of the battlefield regards the bee tiger as a treasure and delimits the forbidden area, and outsiders are not allowed to get close. Even familiar photographers can only take pictures in bamboo sheds.

Blue-throated bees have also appeared sporadically in coastal areas such as Minqing, Yongtai and Fuqing in Fuzhou. Hiding in a secluded place built on the beach, you can quietly capture their bright blue figures at a relatively close distance. The blue-throated bee tiger is not afraid of people. Photographers can leave the beach from their hiding places during three hours of foraging on the beach. As long as they don't stay in hiding for a long time, it won't affect the normal foraging of bees and tigers.

Although the blue-throated bee tiger will land on the sand when foraging, they prefer to rest in line on branches of this thickness. The natural conditions of the beach can't provide this kind of thing, so the locals artificially set up some vines and branches on the beach to make it convenient for birds to stop and people to shoot, and kill two birds with one stone. Without these vines, chickpeas have to fly to the other side of the river and stop on barbed wire during the three-hour foraging process, which is very busy.