"Only the righteous ever see the Kingfisher," is the last line in a brochure on this little bird. Sounds almost Biblical, but no attribution for the quotation. They are not everyday birds yet, for example, sitting in the restaurant window of The Dropping Well in Milltown, south Dublin, you have a fair chance. A writer in Milltown News, the parish quarterly, handed over by Father Tom Stack the other day, Barbara Lightfoot writes of the huge list of birds that may be seen on the Dodder and mentions "the spectacular king fisher which can only be glimpsed in flight." If you hang around in that area you will sooner or later come across the bird, perched on a branch or a post, waiting to dive in after its small fishy prey. One man has it easy. He lives on a small river, and deliberately drove a stake into the bed of a pool outside his living room window, just to watch the action. The kingfishers do land there, and tend to fish from a nearby hanging branch. The same man whose earlier life, both business and recreational, brought him over many parts of the country, was surprised to find that David Cabot puts their population at an estimated 1,300 to 2,100 breeding pairs. He does say that the numbers have decreased in recent years.
Seen up close, the young especially sparkle like a handful of jewellery. The same man received recently a letter from Geneva, in which the writer had attached to the top of the page a brilliant feather, not more than two inches long. The right side was a grey brown, the left a startling sky blue, barred down its length by black streaks. It was from a jay's wing. And if the kingfisher is relatively scarce, the jay has only been seen by the same pair of eyes perhaps three or four times over many years. It is an exotic looking crow with a pinkish- brown body, blue and black barred wing coverts, a white rump and a white patch on the wing.
Yet Cabot tells us that we have an estimated 10,000 pairs in Ireland. He has to be right. It's a case of being in the right place at the right time. The heron has been in the same man's life, on and off, for a long time. We have only 3,650 pairs, Cabot tells us, well scattered. There's something magisterial about his stance that sets him (or her), apart from the rest. Pull back the curtain in early morning, says our peripatetic kingfisher fan, and there is the stately, grey form. You don't grudge him his ration of the river's trout, declining though it is.
But the absence of jays from the area, that's a deprivation.