Hail to the Kingfisher

Kingfisher as depicted in a Medieval bestiary. The artist's
mastery of colour is obvious for all to see.

TO be perfectly clear I'm not in actual fact a twitcher.

The distinction between twitchers and birdwatchers is maybe slightly blurred, but broadly speaking I've understood twitchers to be serious birdwatchers. 

They're heavy-duty spotters - they have notebooks with proper margins, they know the proper anatomical names, they don't get out of bed for anything less than a life tick. But when they do they're usually up and into their wellingtons by four in the morning sharp.

They're the men - and it is to be honest mostly men who twitch - ready and willing to drive the 200 miles to the East Anglian fens in the hope of spotting a passing migrant. And I don't mean the sort that The Daily Express get so angry about.

Generally speaking twitchers are all about seeing as many rare species as possible, hence the long-distance trips and the constant monitoring of forums for word that a Great Auk has made landfall on the Isle of Mull.

I'm not a twitcher and I'm not sure I'm quite committed enough to be pronounced a proper birdwatcher either. I don't have a telescope or Territorial Army-style khaki fatigues or the patience to sit stock-still in a freezing hide trying to identify whatever category of waterfowl is bobbing across the lake.

My Mom is a much more ardent birder, she's one of life's natural sitters and can get readily excited about ducks "in eclipse" - a smart way of describing species at that time of the year when all the interesting feathers have fallen off and all but the most expert of observers end up scribbling "possibly a Gadwall" in their pad after a 20 minute study of dun plumage.

I've always taken rather more after my Dad for whom spotting a Jay or a Green Woodpecker was simply part of the broader appeal of going for a leisurely walk somewhere green. I'm a casual birder, a dabbler, I go where the paths take me - and then head back half-an-hour in because the purple circuit is nine miles long and no-one with my waist-size is completing that without recourse to calling an ambulance.

Fortunately I don't need to go far to find the type of birdwatching which gives me the greatest thrill; the sort where there's not even time to raise the binoculars.

Those random encounters in the open air* which don't depend on a four-hour round trip and precise co-ordinates.

Those glimpses where the name is on your lips as soon as you've seen it rather than teased out over an agonising 45 minutes studying the wingbars of two suspiciously similar illustrations in the Collins Guide.

By way of example, a few weeks ago I was delighted by the flash of blue and burned orange when a Kingfisher flew along the urban riverbank I most regularly walk. 

It's a colour mix almost entirely unique to the several hundred bird species native within these isles ** and its sudden appearance low over the water - like an iridescent Dambuster - sets your pulse racing like little else with wings. The ghostly form of a Barn Owl in your head lamps or a raptor unfurling itself on the thermals of an endless August sky are among the few obvious comparisons. 

True, Kingfishers are certainly not the sort of sighting to mobilise the twitchers to some barren Norfolk waterway. But to the less fervent birder they are undoubtedly an unusual sight. I've been frequenting that stretch of the Cole - the same, in fact, as where my Dad stalked Skylarks 60 years earlier - since the fall of the first lockdown and it is the one and only time I've caught sight of the bird which gives the Project Kingfisher parkland its name.

What makes the spontaneous sighting special is - slightly selfishly - you don't have to share it ***. Unlike slightly shady twitchers who may lob a rock or two to scare off a sighting they'd like to keep to themselves, I have no need to resort to such drastic tactics. Ten seconds or so takes the bird off and away down the river valley. The moment's passed, the river keeps running but your heartbeat is all that bit faster.

The element of surprise also leaves a strong impression which for me you're never going to get from trudging to a pub car park in Lewisham to get a glimpse of exactly the bird you're expecting to see in roughly the place you were told it would be. 

Birdwatching by appointment will simply not match the chance meeting which you feel you've had to earn with something more than just road miles. It's like when you turn the radio on at the precise moment your favourite song starts playing; when the Kingfisher passes and you're there to meet it, it almost feels like the universe has decided you deserve a treat. 

* - I started this sentence only to realise I was making birding sound suspiciously like dogging, a very different type of al-fresco activity. 

** - Making it just about the easiest ID there is. That didn't stop one country sort once questioning a sighting of my Dad's with the insufferably patronising comment that "perhaps it was a Blue Tit." 

*** - Except with my Dad in this case, but I don't begrudge him the moment. He's 72 this year, he's probably only got another couple of Kingfishers in him.