Marina Richie - Halcyon Journey: In Search of the Belted Kingfisher

Some journeys are meant to be hard. Belted kingfishers are loners, territorial, and wary. They are fiendish to study. Yet, a difficult quest promises both allure and reward. The heartbeat of this story pulses along Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, Montana, where a pair of kingfishers still court, nest, and tend their young to the music of rollicking currents. Over the course of seven years, from spring 2008 through the summer of 2015, I followed with curiosity as the birds continued to baffle, elude, and enlighten.

In certain tribal stories, the belted kingfisher is a messenger, helper, or protector. To tap into those powers takes more than one season. Each year, I recorded behaviors in the company of naturalist friends. By the forested creeks edge, I would find the convergence of Greek and indigenous myths, kinship with wild inhabitants, and personal transformation.

Traveling far to investigate clues to the mystery of why the female is more colorful than the male, I met several members of the greater family, from the ringed kingfisher on the Mexico border to the giant kingfisher in South Africa. Seeking the dazzling bird of Greek myth, I prowled Hampstead Heath in London and found the common kingfisher in a dreamlike setting.

On the east coast, I pulled out trays of study skins in an eerie back room of the Smithsonian, paddled below hovering belted kingfishers in a North Carolina bay, and sought wintering birds by Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge over the solstice. Returning to Rattlesnake Creek, I opened my eyes anew to one species on a small stretch of stream in the context of an interwoven planet.

Flying with practiced ease above North Americas streams, rivers, lakes, ponds, and coastlines, belted kingfishers are the supreme avian anglers. They may be only a tad bigger than robins, but their beaks are blades, and their obsidian eyes miss nothing.

Whether hovering or diving from a branch, a kingfishers headfirst plunge to snap fish near the surface is swift and precise. Touching down by cities, towns, farms, and wilderness alike, belted kingfishers flourish only where water is clean, in places with plentiful fish, perches, and coveted earthen nest banks. Even their plumage matches the sheens of water and stonedusky blues, grays, whites, and, for the female, a dash of cinnamony red to form the namesake belt.

In the first days of my pivotal decision to track the kingfisher, on a windy spring afternoon beneath Bozemans Bridger Range, cheering for my sons team from the soccer field sidelines, Id confided to a fellow parent: Id made a discoverya revelation that added a mythic appeal to an already charismatic bird.

Cool, youve found the feel-good bird! the parent said, with that knack he had for clinching the spare phrase, a skill he applied to his prose and a side job of pruning trees, lopping off limbs with editorial precision.

Those prescient words would ring true in ways I had not considered. Like the elusive quality of idyllic halcyon days, the secretive nature of kingfishers would prove instrumental to my happiness. Running, stumbling, tangling through wild rose and hawthorns, shivering, and staying put for hours, Id savor every hard-fought glimpse. A surge of feeling good resulted from tenacity, like a marathoner crossing a finish line, another personal goal I finally achieved in September of 2015.

Thats one kind of feeling good. Another stemmed from immersion in my home creek with the kingfisher as a guide. Dabbling toes in the frigid wilderness-fed waters, my senses awakened to the syncopated glugs, sprays, froths, and singing of an enlivened stream.