HALCYON

bill. He was watching, listening, turning his head from time to time. After a while, with a deft hop, he turned to face away from me, jewelled flash of azure and sapphire. Eventually, he took off to the bank and landed on a slender reed stem that bent under his minimal weight, curving into an arch over the water. Like an acrobat, he turned again on the almost non-existent balance line of the reed. He remained there watching, listening, waiting, revolving his head from side to side, scouting for fish before making a lightning dive, turquoise torpedo disappearing momentarily into the water with a plop, then out again on to a willow branch, fish in beak. Halcyon bird, bird of the Greek gods who hurled a thunderbolt at Alcyone’s lover and killed him, upon which she drowned herself for grief. Repentant, the gods turned the lovers into a pair of blue-plumaged Male Kingfisher (Alcedo atthis) emerging from water with a fish birds who built a floating raft of fishbones on which to lay their eggs. They saw to it that the winds and the water were calm enough for the incubation period, ensuring that new life could emerge: halcyon days. Days to make the most of, for Kingfishers are short-lived. One year may be their allotted span. As they laser through our vision with flash of sapphire light, these beings represent ephemerality. Ice and sapphire conjure flame, wrote Norfolk poet Peter Scupham of the king of fishers who can catch up to 100 fish a day while feeding their young; and they can have two or three broods of up to 10, in a good year, so that’s a lot of fish. Poet John Clare observes how a Kingfisher feeds on fish and sits on a branch of a tree that hangs over a river for hours on the watch for any small fish that passes by, when it darts down and seizes its prey in a moment. Kingfishers were spirits of good luck in bird folklore, and Clare tells how, in some places, they hang a dead Kingfisher up in the kitchen to note the weather by, as it is said that its head turns to the rainy quarter when rain is expected. Shooters on the Norfolk Broads used to get one shilling a piece for a Kingfisher’s skin: too brilliant to be real, wrote pioneering photographer and ornithologist Emma Turner in the early 1900s, a tiny statue bedecked with precious stones of sapphire, turquoise, ruby, and scarlet feet. My Kingfisher shot off from his branch, rapier-fast, jewelled streak of lapis and flash of rust, flying dead straight along the middle of the river, and disappeared around a bend like a missile, piping, fleeting streak of electric blue searing the water to land somewhere out of sight. Rosamond Richardson