Kingfishers are a family, the Alcedinidae, of small to medium-sized, brightly coloured birds in the order Coraciiformes.

They have a cosmopolitan distribution, with most species living in the tropical regions of Africa, Asia, and Oceania, but also can be found in Europe and the Americas.

All kingfishers have large heads, long, sharp, pointed bills, short legs, and stubby tails.

Like other members of their order, they nest in cavities, usually tunnels dug into the natural or artificial banks in the ground.

The kingfisher family Alcedinidae is in the order Coraciiformes, which also includes the motmots, bee-eaters, todies, rollers, and ground-rollers.

[5][6] In spite of the word "kingfisher" in their English vernacular names, many of these birds are not specialist fish-eaters; none of the species in Halcyoninae are.

In Greek mythology, one of the Pleiades named Alcyone (Alcedo in Latin) married Ceyx who was killed in a shipwreck.

[9][10][11] The number of species in each family is taken from the list maintained by Frank Gill, Pamela C. Rasmussen and David Donsker on behalf of the International Ornithological Committee (IOC).

Several fossil birds have been erroneously ascribed to the kingfishers, including Halcyornis, from the Lower Eocene rocks in Kent, which has also been considered a gull, but is now thought to have been a member of an extinct family.

The few species found in the Americas, all from the subfamily Cerylinae, suggest that the sparse representation in the Western Hemisphere resulted from just two original colonising events.

[17] The common Australian kingfisher, known as the laughing kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae), is the heaviest species, with females reaching nearly 500 g (18 oz) in weight.

The largest and most atypical bill is that of the shovel-billed kookaburra, which is used to dig through the forest floor in search of prey.

[14] Individual species may have massive ranges, like the common kingfisher, which ranges from Ireland across Europe, North Africa, and Asia as far as the Solomon Islands in Australasia, or the pied kingfisher, which has a widespread distribution across Africa and Asia.

They are most famous for hunting and eating fish, and some species do specialise in catching fish, but other species take crustaceans, frogs and other amphibians, annelid worms, molluscs, insects, spiders, centipedes, reptiles (including snakes), and even birds and mammals.

The red-backed kingfisher has been observed hammering into the mud nests of fairy martins to feed on their nestlings.

[21] The shovel-billed kookaburra uses its massive, wide bill as a shovel to dig for worms in soft mud.

They are threatened by habitat loss caused by forest clearance or degradation and in some cases by introduced species.

[24] For the Dusun people of Borneo, the Oriental dwarf kingfisher is considered a bad omen, and warriors who see one on the way to battle should return home.

Modern taxonomy also refers to the winds and sea in naming kingfishers after a classical Greek myth.

They died for this, but the other gods, in an act of compassion, made them into birds, thus restoring them to their original seaside habitat.

In another version, a woman named Alcyone was cast into the waves by her father for her promiscuity and was turned into a kingfisher.

The etymology of kingfisher (Alcedo atthis) is obscure; the term comes from "king's fisher", but why that name was applied is not known.