Out Of The Blue

When snow falls and waters harden, the kingfisher’s brilliance becomes even more fleeting

- Jim Crumley

IT'S wet and cold and grey. Scots invented the word "dreich" for such a December day. It does what it says on the tin. And December does dreich like no other month of Scotland's calendar. Unless you are a kingfisher.

Kingfishers don't do dreich.

Snow along the riverbank. Not much - an inch or two at the most - but enough to tell tales about who was up and doing through the dark and the dawn.

A trotting otter swished its tail through the midst of its footprints, blurring their distinctiveness whenever it changed direction. After 50 yards it veered to the top of the bank, where the riverbank contrives a gentle ramp, and slid splashlessly into the water.

The kingfisher was already perched in the willow’s weeping network of skinny, low and leafless winter-bared branches when the otter arrived, each flimsy branch lightly furred with filigree snow.

Nothing is more certain hereabouts than that otter and kingfisher know each other, and perhaps one warned the other that the human in the drab green jacket and matching wellies with black overtrousers was back again, hunkered on the far bank and watching the willow by the bend in the river.

Always watching, but never trying to catch anything to eat, which didn’t make much sense to a hunting otter or a kingfisher resting between dives.

The otter had been and gone. A dark wake under the far bank, an extravagant leap into a decisive down-curve more like a forward roll than a dive, the final tail flourish a vertical signature scribbled on the cold, wet morning air.

The kingfisher edged forward on its branch, prompting what was possibly the smallest fall of snow in all nature and for all time. It removed an inch of toe-deep snow-fur from the kingfisher’s branch, and that displaced snow » had disintegrated into nothing much at all before it reached the surface of the river four feet below.