A Bird In The Hand

The belted kingfisher in my hands: a warm cloud of feathers, sooty blue-grey above, white below, a bright hint of rust edging bellyward just under the point at which wings join the body. Blue-grey bands the breast, white collars the short thick neck, blue spurts from the massive head in a ragged crest. The bill is an ivory lance as long and stout as my little finger. The black eyes glitter, wary. But the bird does not struggle nor feint with its bill. It does not even quiver. My palms cup the rapid beating of its heart.

Its size astonishes. It looks not much bigger than swallow or sandpiper as it flies over the wide and salty river that flows past my front door. Hunched on a snag or a piling, it seems no bigger than a robin. Distance deceives, and so does the bird's shape, great shaggy head dwarfing the stub-tailed body. Though the kingfisher feels as weightless as a puff of smoke, its size is nearly that of a crow.

All morning and all afternoon, this kingfisher and one other chattered along our September shore, zipping upriver, down, back up again. Though they must have taken time-out to hover and dive for food, their noisy to-and-fro flights have seemed continuous, suggesting play--a grand game of chase that had started at sunup and would cease only when sundown said okay kids, time for bed. But the game ended with forty-five minutes of good daylight left. The halt came abruptly, rudely. On a fast swing upriver, both birds swooped low over the river's surface, and one fell in. Nothing unusual about kingfishers plunging into the water--they collect their fishy dinners by diving in bill first and rising again. This one, however, did not. The Chief and I watched it from the trailer's doorway and, watching still, moved out on the deck, went into the yard. The bird in the water was swimming. The bird in the air hovered, called, flew down to check its teammate, flew up, and repeated these motions half a dozen times before it proceeded elsewhere. At first, it appeared that the swimmer was headed toward the riverbank for a firm footing, and a takeoff well before sunset. We cheered it shoreward. But the bird moved awkwardly. It spun in loose, tipsy little circles and made little headway. Then, current or clumsiness or fatigue caused it to turn around. Inch by slow inch, it left land behind. And the sun was slipping down, staining the water crimson. Small bird on vast river--we could not bear to watch another minute. I pulled on a jumpsuit, grabbed a dip net, and waded out.

And the bird is ashore now, warm and unresisting in my hand. It's larger than life, and not just in close-up proportions. In the beat of the kingfisher's heart, I also feel the pulse of myth. I hold the halcyon.

Aristotle wrote of the halcyon's power. Though an uncanny accuracy usually marks his observations of the natural world, his tales of the halcyon bear the stamp of myth. Most birds, he says, breed in spring or summer, but not the halcyon. It chooses instead the harshest time of year, the winter solstice. But the gods give aid: they put to sleep the prevailing northerlies and send in gentle breezes from the south for fourteen days--the seven needed for the bird to build her nest, the other seven for the laying and hatching of her five eggs. A gift of calm amid hibernal storms, the rolling and breaking seas made still, made safe for sailors and traveling merchants--this is a holy interlude, the halcyon days.

Such dulcet rumor has enjoyed a long and hallowed life. Long before Aristotle's time, a story related the origin of the halcyon days. Alcyone was daughter to quick-moving, changeable Aeolus, king of the winds. She married Ceyx, son of the Morning Star. And they lived happily, but not ever after, for Alcyone compared their earthly wedded bliss to that in heaven and, in the wild abandon of pillow talk, dared called herself Hera and her husband Zeus. Predictably, the Olympian couple felt themselves denigrated by the comparison, and they sought to put the upstarts in their place. That winter, leaving Alcyone at home, Ceyx sailed off to consult an oracle. Seizing their chance when it came along, the king and queen of the gods arranged for a storm at sea. A monstrous wave broke over Ceyx's ship and washed him overboard. When Alcyone received the news of his drowning, her grief rose so huge and unappeasable that she attempted to join him by throwing her own body into the sea. But a god of the unassuming sort that does anonymous good works showed his pity by turning Wind's daughter and the son of the Morning Star into kingfishers. And from that time to this, the female kingfisher, chattering her sorrow, carries her dead mate's body out to sea. The wintry waves grow calm to receive him. When the waters close over his feathers, she builds a nest, launches it, and lays her eggs as soon as land is out of sight.

Thanks to Pliny, the Roman natural historian, we have a description of Alcyone's mythical nest. It is a round, hollow ball that may be entered through a narrow, projecting mouth. It looks like a sponge, and some people think it's made of sea-foam. The substance is so dry and tough it cannot be cut by a knife, though a hard blow may break it apart.

Halcyon days. Now who would be so rudely skeptical as to think it mere coincidence when calm spells visit the Mediterranean Sea at the time of the winter solstice? They're part of the normal weather. Did they not, however, originate through Alcyone's grievous needs? But her tragedy is largely forgotten. Now she is only a name without body or history. Halcyon: like its namesake, the word has undergone metamorphosis, serving as an adjective that shines with visions of the idyllic or providing the noun that designates the species of a quite real bird.

But the kingfisher she became is with us not only as the chattering bird that hovers and dives for fish. It is present also as the spirit bird that wings and preens in centuries of poems. Three hundred years after Aristotle, the Latin poet Virgil placed kingfishers on an intimate basis with divine energies; they were dilectae Thetidi alcyones, "pets of the sea-nymphs." And the rumor that kingfishers charmed the seas crept with marveling appreciation into English poetry. Typical are Joshua Sylvester's early seventeenth century lines:

And the king's fisher, which so builds her nest
By the seaside in midst of winter season
That man, in whom shines the bright lamp of reason,
Cannot devise with all the wit he has,
Her little building how to raise or raze:
So long as there her quiet couch she keeps,
Sicilian sea exceeding calmly sleeps,
For Aeolus, fearing to drown her brood,
Keeps home the while, and troubles not the flood.

Sylvester, of course, observes the emblematic bird, the bird that promises calm to human beings as well as to water, and he sees the Wind-Father as granting a period of grace to the presumptuous daughter who dared compare herself to deity. Several decades later, Andrew Marvell, he of the coy mistress, uses the fabulous name to look at the real bird:

The modest halcyon comes in sight
Flying betwixt the day and night.

Worldwide, close to ninety species of kingfishers fly betwixt day and night. Of all this rackety, fleet-winged tribe only the belted kingfisher--the bird that Audubon would have named the United States kingfisher--is found in eastern North America, and it alone bears Alcyone's name. In the traditional Latinate binomial, Megaceryle alcyon, mega means great, and ceryle is a general term used by long-gone Greeks to refer to a probably mythical seabird. (Recently, in the cause of mysterious nomenclature housecleaning, mega has been dropped.) Alcyon of course makes whispered remembrance of a desolate, determined queen.

Fall, winter, and spring, the river's halcyons follow the shoreline in clattering flight or perch on a branch, a piling, an electric power line above the water. They prefer to station themselves in open places that cast no shadows to obscure the water's surface and the tasty morsels swimming below. When they fly looking for fish, they may scan the water from heights as great as thirty feet. And, prey found, they tuck in their wings, aim their large bills straight down, and strike like homing missiles. Fish make up the main part of their diet, but they'll also sustain themselves on other foods--aquatic delicacies such as oysters and mussels, terrestrial tidbits like salamanders, mice, and baby birds. Reliable observers also report that they sometimes behave like flycatchers, taking moths and butterflies on the wing.

But in June and July, as summer bubbles and comes to a steamy boil, the halcyons of Great Neck Point virtually disappear. On rare occasions, one or two birds may grant a random display, but the rest are gone. Though belted kingfishers are as monogamously faithful as Alcyone during their breeding season, they have not heeded Aristotle. Each mated pair has flown elsewhere to excavate a burrow-nest in a bank above the water, a job that may take from a few days to two weeks. And they incubate their five to eight eggs for slightly more than three weeks. Nor are the nests tidy but reek of decomposing fish. Only when the young are fledged do kingfishers reappear in numbers along our waterfront.

Their flight traces exactly the contours of our shore. It seems as if their rapid rattle calls sew a tightly stitched seam betwixt the water and the land. And in winter, when they are most visible and loud, the northerlies do sometimes sleep. The whitecaps vanish, the river purls and sparkles, and people leave their storm-sealed dens to go outside, to open themselves to sun and the noisy presence of kingfishers. It is quite reasonable then to associate our alcyon with smiling calm. It is quite possible to believe again in summer.

The sun is down. In gathering darkness I put warm, almost weightless myth on the trailer's deck. Fly away, fly! I think the bird is young, one of this summer's brood. The dazzling, daylong exhibition--upriver, down again--was play and, at the same time, a serious exercise in acquiring grown-up skills. I also think the bird might be female. Reversing the usual avian style of couture, drab hen and gaudy cock, the female belted kingfisher wears richer plumage than the male. Below her smoky blue-gray breastband, she sports a stomacher the color of rust or red clay. This bird that I've held shows traces of such ripe feathering, the beginnings perhaps of fully adult garb.

Fly, bird, fly! But it does not take wing. It crouches on stumpy legs and turns its great head to look first at me, then at the Chief. Though no splinter of bone pokes through the feathers and no blood shows, it may be hurt. Was a wing bruised on sudden contact with the water? What shall we do with you, bird?

Luckily, there is a resource, the Outer Banks Wildlife Shelter, located not, hallelujah, on the Outer Banks, those impossibly distant barrier islands, but only a hop and a jump away in Morehead City. And volunteers man the shelter till 9:00 p.m. While the Chief keeps an eye on the feathered drop-in, I use the telephone. We are instructed to put the bird in a cardboard box. The darkness of such an enclosure will serve to induce and maintain quiescence. Come daylight, if the bird is still alive, we are to bring it in for examination and further care.

In the morning, the bird is very much alive. It hops in the box and glares at me balefully. Its ivory mandibles close on my index finger as if it were a fish. I see that there's been a definite injury: a steak of dried blood mats the feathers below the right wing. I close the box, and off we go.

The volunteer at the shelter's front desk opens the box and takes a peek. "So big!" she says. "I've never been this close to one before." Then she bids me to call the next day to see how the kingfisher fares.

It does not survive. Not only was a bone in the right wing broken, but the droppings contained much blood, a sign of severe internal injury. It must have occurred on the bird's sudden, unplanned impact with the river. Water appears to be soft, but hit the wrong way, it's as hard as a boulder.

A bird in the hand--I'm grateful for the opportunity, though ill chance brought it about. But it's brutally clear that the hoary adage has got the truth backwards. A bird in the hand is never worth two in the bush, in the nest, in the free-ranging air. RWOL

Janet Lembke, a translator of Greek and Latin classics, is the author of many books including Dangerous Birds (ISBN 1-55821-190-X) from which this essay is taken. A Bird in the Hand first appeared in Audubon magazine. It appears here with the permission of the author. Dangerous Birds and her other books about nature are published by Lyons & Burford. Copyright c 1992 by Janet Lembke.

[Top] [Home]