In the Western world our relationship with nature is unnatural. Hunger is historical, and any animals that could have been a threat to us, the wolves and bears, have been either eliminated or pushed into ever more remote outposts. I could walk in the forest at night and fear nothing, because there is nothing worse to fear than the possibility of bumping into a tree in the darkness. Close encounters with wildlife are very different when the wildlife you are watching would sooner eat you than run away from you.
It was the end of the season and I was going down into the valley, to a hidden vantage point overhung by trees on a secluded, wooded reach of the river. I approached perpendicular to the river so that I could go directly to my chosen place without having to walk the bank and risk disturbing anything. I got comfortable and prepared myself for a long wait. After all those months of crashing along the riverbank with my clipboard in hand it was time to enjoy the simple benefits of sitting quietly and seeing what happens. There was nothing there to see as I arrived, and that was surely good, for it meant there was nothing to disturb. It was a pleasant, sunny day on a narrow stretch of river where the trees on each side reached out and shaded at least half of the water’s surface. The waters here ran fast and shallow, their gentle babbling the ideal accompaniment for a long vigil. It is difficult to remain still for long periods, but I’d had practice: all those evenings out watching the badgers and the woodcocks, the rainy days sat on my doorstep beneath the shelter of my porch just watching the world go by, and most of all a multitude of nights sat doing nothing by the flickering fire.
I didn’t have long to wait. The kingfisher announced that it was coming; they always seem to call as they patrol the river. It perched on the overhanging branch of the tree right beside me, and I could tell that in spite of its glorious plumage this bird was a juvenile — it had the same black legs as the flightless bird I had found not far from here. From that second on the river seemed to be alive with kingfishers, flying past repeatedly in ones and twos. There was no way of guessing how many there were as they flew up and down, back and forth. The youngster in the tree next to me took off after a passing bird, but was soon replaced by another that settled directly opposite me on a branch that hung low over the water. This new arrival had the bright red legs of an adult. In fact, I could tell that this was the female, for though their plumage is indistinguishable, the male’s bill is all black, while the female has a distinctive red lower mandible.
As I watched, a nuthatch that had been hopping around the hazels near by found itself a nut. It had done well to find one as I never managed to get my hands on any myself; the grey squirrels took all the hazelnuts while they were still small and green. The nuthatch carried its find over to the tree beside me, wedged the nut into a crevice in its bark, and began to hammer away at it. It was remarkably noisy at such close range. I could see it out of the corner of my eye but didn’t want to make a move — it was so close. It surprised me that the kingfisher wasn’t distracted by the noise, but it was obviously a familiar sound and she ignored it entirely, her attention focused instead on the water drifting by beneath her perch. And then she dived. A second or two later she was back on her perch with a fish in her beak. A perfect view of a kingfisher fishing, like something out of a documentary, soundtracked by the nuthatch on rhythm, and the river on melody. Over the course of the next ten minutes the kingfisher caught three more fish. The first two she ate herself, the third she carried off for her young. There was a lull for a while — the kingfisher had gone and the nuthatch too — and then a loud piercing call and a kingfisher shot upriver, flying low and fast. Right on its tail, a rather optimistic buzzard was in hot pursuit, trying its hardest to keep up without its wingtips getting wet. A minute later, the kingfisher returned alone, quite unruffled.
A family of goosanders was making its way upriver to where I was waiting. It made a change to see them swimming towards me for once instead of sailing away. By this late stage in the season, the young birds were able to fly, and were virtually impossible to tell apart from the mother bird. Perhaps she was still a fraction larger, her crest still a little shaggier; and she was still the boss. There were thirteen in this family, and they were fishing in an extraordinary fashion that I had never witnessed before. They were spread in a dead-straight line across the entire width of the river, which was perhaps forty feet at this point, the mother in the very middle of the river and six of her young to either side of her, perfectly evenly spaced. They reminded me of a line of pheasant-beaters. All had their necks stretched flat out across the surface of the water before them, with their eyes just underwater, for some of the time at least. Every few seconds they would scuttle forward with a flick of their big red feet and snatch at a fish. Splash and grab. Only the few birds in midstream actually needed to dive, so shallow was the water here at this moment. As they all filed past me, the nearest bird was barely ten feet away, but it saw nothing; only noise or movement would have alerted them and caused their usual panic.
Soon after they had passed me, the birds turned and began to drift downriver, falling out of line as the faster water midstream sent a few of them surging ahead. I thought that was the end of the show, but not at all; after fifty yards they all turned back towards me again, assumed their positions and began to work their beat. Just as they reached me, they must have encountered a whole shoal of tiny fish, for the half-dozen or so birds furthest across the river from me suddenly formed themselves into a tight semicircle, almost wing to wing, and pushed towards the far shore. I had no idea that birds could perform such coordinated teamwork when they hunted; each bird seemed to know the exact position to take, while those on my side of the river held their posts, undistracted by the feeding frenzy taking place in the shallows opposite. Once again, as soon as they had passed the shallow rapids where I had positioned myself, they turned and drifted back down the river just as they had before, to regroup and begin one more pass. This was to be the final time; perhaps they had used up everything the river had to offer here, or perhaps their hunger had just been sated. They broke rank and gathered in a cluster around the mother bird in the middle of the river, directly in front of me, as if for a debrief. They held their position perfectly, swimming so that their pace matched the current exactly, and began to preen themselves with their brilliant red serrated bills. Time had stood still and I felt invisible; I could scarcely believe what I had seen, and that I had the shyest birds on the river still no more than twenty feet away, oblivious to my presence. And then one by one they finished their preening, folded up their long necks like coiling snakes, tucked their slender bills under their wings, and slept.
9. What Remains
Summer came to a reluctant end. The buzzards and the kites circled lazily on the thermals, rising high, and the ravens were out with their three young, rolling and calling continually. But the hillside was still mostly silent in the sunshine, and the songbirds were still hidden away in the moult. The first to emerge was a party of mistle thrushes, sleek and glossy in their new plumage, which seemed to have adopted my patch of hillside as their hunting ground. There were at least thirty of them, along with a handful of camp followers, a few chaffinches and a couple of warblers. For four days I watched them closely whenever they were in sight. I knew that thirty fat thrushes would not have attracted my attention alone, and the thrushes seemed to know this too; they fed on the ground but were twitchy and nervous, and would stay close to the trees, ready to dive for cover at the slightest provocation.