Asian Green Bee-eater

The Asian green bee-eater is a slender, bright green bird with a golden-rufous wash on the crown and upper back, a blue-tinged chin and throat, a fine black line through the eye and a thin black crescent across the top of the breast. The flight feathers are rufous washed with green, and the two central tail feathers extend into long, thin streamers about 7 cm beyond the rest of the tail. Its call, usually given in flight, is a nasal trilling tree-tree-tree (Wikipedia, general species account).

It hunts from low perches, often a metre or less above the ground, and uses fence and electric wires readily. Insects, especially bees, wasps and ants, are caught in short sallies and carried back to the perch, where the bird beats them to remove the sting before swallowing. Unlike some bee-eaters it can live far from water. Birds are sluggish in the early morning and often huddle side by side on wires with their bills tucked into their backs, and they sand-bathe often. Some populations move with the seasons (Wikipedia, general species account).

This is one of India's most familiar birds, found across a very large range of about 2.2 million km² and increasingly in towns and suburbs. The State of India's Birds 2023 finds both its long-term trend (a change of about -3% since before 2000, within the margin of error) and its current annual trend stable, classes it as a resident that is not tied to any one habitat, and rates it a Low conservation priority (SoIB 2023).