THE KINGFISHER CURE
Five months after his mother’s death, Charlie Corbett feels lost and alone until he encounters a flash of orange and blue on a fishing trip
How Charlie Corbett found solace in a flash of orange and blue on a fishing trip
There is no bird that better embodies the feeling of emerging from the darkness into the dazzling light of an exciting and undiscovered world than the kingfisher. Whenever I see that flash of burnished orange and electric blue spiriting itself across the top of the water like a silent, low-flying Spitfire at zero-degrees altitude, my heart jolts. To see a kingfisher in flight is both incredibly exciting and incredibly calming.
The ancients believed that kingfisher nests drifted on ocean currents, spreading calm for miles around. The word ‘halcyon’ is derived from this myth. The ancient Greeks knew it as the halcyon bird, which could still the wind and the sea. On the days I see a kingfisher, I don’t need family or friends to calm my troubled soul. On those days, I don’t need anybody because I have my halcyon bird and it bathes me in happy tranquillity.
I don’t always see a kingfisher when I want to see one, but that makes the odd sighting that much sweeter. The chief source of excitement comes in large part from this little sparrow-sized
bird’s extraordinary colours. Set against the subtle greens and browns of our land, it looks like an exquisitely adorned visitor from the Amazon rainforest. It lights up the riverbank like a dazzling samba dancer skipping through a dimly lit pub. The soundlessness of its flight is also peculiarly satisfying. If I’m lucky enough to see a kingfisher fishing, I’ll watch agog as it spears into the water without making a noise or even a splash. It slices in like a razorblade. At the same time, or shortly after, a wave of peace descends upon me.
Here is a bird completely in tune with its watery ecosystem, an ecosystem that doesn’t so much provide individual moments of solace but that joins the dots of nature, that shows me how the natural world comes together as a single organism: an interlinked chain of life of which I am very much a part. It became an important part of my healing process after Mum died. Once I’d seen my first kingfisher on our local canal, I became an addict. More than anything, looking for them taught me that I am never alone in nature, especially by the water. They may be deeply solitary, but their presence is integral to any healthy and diverse riverbank.
FISHING FOR SOLACE
About five months after Mum’s death, I went fishing with three old friends on a chalk stream near my home in Wiltshire. Chalk streams harbour an abundance of life. At the source, the water rises up out of the ground, bubbling up from deep aquifers before setting its course for the sea without fanfare, over gravel and flint beds that purify the water, making it gin-clear. And yet I had never felt so alone. Even though I was getting by, and my new connection to wildlife was helping me find much-needed perspective and reassurance, a profound feeling of loneliness gnawed away at my soul. Concerned friends had, naturally, moved on with their lives, but the fact was that Mum was still gone, Dad remained broken, I was still raw and there was no one I felt I could talk to.
I tried to focus on the fishing and hoped nature would work its magic, as it had many times before. But I couldn’t. I failed to catch a trout that morning and, throughout lunch, I was brooding. I felt out of reach and stuck inside my lonely brain. I felt alone.
That afternoon, I just wanted to be on my own. I said to the others I was going to try a few casts upstream and headed off to a hidden place I’d spotted in the morning, where the river took a giant U-turn back onto itself. Using my fishing bag as a pillow, I lay my head down and quickly fell into a wine-induced riverside trance.
Around me was a delicate pastel palette of wild flowers like willowherb and loosestrife, set against deep green clutches of reed. And what a racket that reed was making. I could hear the chattering refrain of what sounded like a cathedral choir of reed warblers. A moorhen then scuttled out from under the bank beneath me, dashing across the surface of the water like its life depended on it, kek-kek-kekking as it went, before a grey heron launched its longlimbed frame awkwardly into the air, its giant wings flapping so slowly as if to defy all the known physics of aviation. Everywhere I looked, nature was imposing itself on my senses.
What I had seen before as a lonely spot under this willow – a place to wallow in my solitary self – was anything but. And yet, still, there was one piece missing from this busy riverbank scene, one more piece of nature’s jigsaw I longed for: the kingfisher.
I knew it would come if I waited long enough and had patience. And, as if on cue, there it was – the briefest of brief flashes of orange and electric blue darting elegantly across my field of vision. A split second and it was gone, no doubt scything into the water out of view after a tasty minnow or stickleback. But that was enough for me. The picture was complete. I rushed back downstream to my friends, bursting at the seams with news of the kingfisher. And while lunchtime’s beer and red wine had deposited an inky black residue behind my eyes, I felt spiritually refreshed. Like the water around me, my mind was somehow cleansed and purified. I could see then why the ancient Greeks called it the halcyon bird. I understood why they believed it could calm storms – just as it had calmed something inside of me.
It lights up the riverbank like a dazzling samba dancer in a dimly lit pub