The Wise Kingfisher, by Anita Albus
The third of three extracts from Anita Albus’s On Rare Birds, a lavishly illustrated tale of ten rare or extinct birds.
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Weaving together natural history and investigative reporting with mythological and cultural material, On Rare Birds tells the compelling stories of ten rare or extinct bird species – from the tragic demise of the once-abundant Passenger Pigeon to the shooting death of the last Carolina Parakeet in the wild, and from the startling natural defences of the wilful Nightjar to the diverse cultural significance of the Kingfisher. Some stories bear sad witness to precious species we have lost, but they are all fascinating and often heartwarming or humorous depictions of the unique lives and loves of birds.
On Rare Birds is a visually stunning volume illustrated by author Anita Albus’s own superb artwork and by images ranging over five centuries. It will delight anyone who loves birds, laments the depletion of their populations by human hands, and cares about the survival of those species that still stand a chance. With knowledge, devotion, and a true artist’s eye, Albus explains in graceful, precise prose why the decline of these bird species is a great loss both to the natural world and, unavoidably, to culture. With each species lost, a world is lost to human understanding-to our arts, our mythology, and our environment.
Extract 3, from “The Wise Kingfisher”
There is a legend that the Kingfisher’s nest floats on the sea, a fable harking back to Aristotle. We read in Book ix of his History of Animals that the nests are pale red and shaped like a long-necked gourd larger in size than the largest sponge; that they have a roof, with extensive solid and hollow parts unable to be cut even by the sharpest knife; but that they can shatter like sea-foam when crushed with one’s hands. Its narrow mouth, serving as an entranceway, is located in such a way that even in rough seas water cannot get in. And, Aristotle concludes, there is a question as to the material Alcyon constructs its nest with: it is thought to be largely made from bones of the needlefish (Belone belone), for these birds live by eating fish.
Pliny writes in much the same vein:
It is a very great chaunce to see one of these Halcyones, and never are they seene but about the setting of the starre Virgiliae, or else neere mid-summer or mid-winter: for otherwhiles they will flie about a ship, but soone are they gone againe
and hidden… Their nests are wonderously made, in fashion of a round bal: the mouth or entrie thereof standeth somewhat out, and is very narrow, much like unto great spunges. A man cannot cut and pierce their nest, with sword or hatchet; but break they wil with some strong knocke, like as the drie fome of the sea…
In Pliny’s time, no one had ever seen a Kingfisher on the nest. But since this diving bird’s nest was nowhere to be found among reed beds or riparian bushes, then where might it be if not on the water? A bird with such sparkling, green-blue, and rusty red plumage, a bird that can calm a December sea, merits the most wondrous nest of all. Polyps broken off from a pale red species of leather coral would float on the sea and so were thought to be Kingfisher nests. Alcyonium was the name Linnaeus chose for the genus of these eight-armed corals in remembrance of the legend of the Kingfisher’s nest. …
In the moral world of emblems, almost every animal can be interpreted in bono or in malo, depending on the context in which it appears. But not so for the Kingfisher. Whether it symbolises marital fidelity, the productivity of peace, farsighted prudence, a sense of kairos, leisure time for art or calming the mind, unshakable trust in God, constancy, or justice—the bird with the most resplendently colored feathers in our hemisphere always sets a fine example. Such a magnificent, glamorous creature must have seemed the incarnation of sophrosyne to an age for which the Beautiful was unquestionably the Good. A Kingfisher is a Kingfisher—not the same creature as a person called a “kingfisher.” That person was considered sly, shrewd, crafty, and scheming.
Gone are the days when moralising would transfigure fine-looking birds. The Kingfisher is stereotyped today as a “flying jewel.” That is why the unsociable “king’s fisher” enjoys great popularity as a photographic subject. But no photographer can capture the dynamic beauty of the structural color of its plumage:
The green and blue colors sparkle and shimmer most splendidly, one quickly changing into another when the angle of the light varies as the bird turns, or when it is seen from a different position and in a different light. In completely bright light, for example, those gorgeous colors blend into a unique, prismatically magnificent blue green, seemingly poured over the entire bird from above. But if the bird is seen in semidarkness, its colors all revert either to a lovely ultramarine or to a marvelous, somewhat darker azure blue, depending on how the light strikes it, from which side, which angle, and so forth. The countless gradations shade from the deepest blue over to the brightest green so that it should come as no surprise if someone calls a color green that someone else takes to be blue at the same time. [Naumann]
Illustration by Susemihl, circa 1800
