It’s funny how kingfishers, the boldest-coloured birds in Britain, have inspired so much confusion. The commonest example concerns their size. Many people seeing one for the first time are flabbergasted at its smallness.
A recent encounter reminded me just how sparrow-like they are. For 20 minutes, I’d sat before a pool scanning the middle distance for harriers and winter geese, before noticing a kingfisher had been perched there all the time. It was only when it made its silvery piping notes that I fixed its location on a reed mace head.
It then caught three sticklebacks and battered each on a favourite perch, before gulping them down. This hearty appetite chimes with another key fiction. Kingfishers were viewed as remorseless destroyers of fish. While some of this is true – a nesting pair can catch 115 fish in one day – almost all their prey are minnows and sticklebacks. Unfortunately, the owners of trout fisheries thought otherwise and, according to the ornithologist David Bannerman, “almost exterminated the bird in the 19th century”.
Even more mystifying was the proscribing of kingfishers through the 1566 Acte for the Preservation of Grayne, which also operated on the delusion that the dipper and kingfisher were the same species. Bounties were paid for both and, even in 1879, the Duchess of Sutherland authorised the slaughter of 368 dippers. Alas for that species: it mainly eats caddis-fly larvae.
The most enduring kingfisher myth owes its 2,000-year history partly to the founder of western science, Aristotle, who claimed that the bird made its nest on the sea surface in a period of winter calm. Incidentally, this is where we got the phrase “halcyon days”, which is now – of course – synonymous with summer.
The idea that kingfishers were associated with calm weather meant their feathers were kept as charms to ward off thunder or for general good fortune. A naturalist travelling in Russia noted that a distraught local blamed his wife’s death on the loss of his kingfisher amulet.
Most of these untruths have had baleful consequences for this bird of sky and flame, but there is one myth I rather like: only the righteous get to see them.
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