Gallery: Belted Queenfisher

From the Summer 2023 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

When the American Birding Association asked artist Liz Clayton Fuller (a former Cornell Lab of Ornithology Bartels Science Illustrator) to create a painting that celebrates the ABA’s 2023 Bird of the Year, the Belted Kingfisher, she was excited. “Kingfishers have been with me in all of the different places I’ve lived,” she says. The ABA enabled Fuller to maximize her color palette by specifically requesting that she depict the female, which she dubbed the “Queenfisher.” Female Belted Kingfishers have a rich, rust-colored belly band that the males lack.