Kingfisher by Ildiko Szabo

The present volume deals extensively with the iconology of the chaste European common kingfisher and their North American counterpart, the belted kingfisher, plus their antithesis, the Australian swashbuckling, laughing kookaburra. The bulk of the kingfisher's appearance in Anglophone culture focuses on these three birds. It is extremely unfair to judge an entire bird family of 114-plus species on only a few iconic ones. Doubly so when considering how diverse, how bizarre and how resourceful the rest of the kingfisher clan is. Many of these lesser-known kingfishers are sensationally beautiful and fascinating in their own right. It is the iridescent plumage of the majority of them that transforms them into dazzling feathered jewels. For the birds themselves, their splendid attire is both a benefit and a curse. Some civilizations have venerated kingfishers, but more commonly they were, and still are in a few regions, hunted for food or for the economic value of their dazzling plumage.

I have a tattoo of a kingfisher on my right arm. It's a reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "As kingfishers catch fire," a sonnet whose central idea is that the bronze flash of the common kingfisher is part of its essential, God-bestowed essence, and an expression of God's own being. So we all, Hopkins argues, express God through our essential qualities. The bird on my arm is not the common kingfisher, found in Europe and Asia, but the belted kingfisher, one of the first birds I remember really noticing as a child, sitting on a wire in the same spot every day on my ride to school. Today, when I see a belted kingfisher buzzing over or diving through water, or sitting by the waterside, I feel a thrill of familiarity and kinship.

Ildiko Szabo's Kingfisher is one in a series called Animal, published by Reaktion Books, each of which focuses on a different animal, detailing not only its behavior and taxonomy, but its cultural significance. Kingfisher was a knowing gift by a friend. Szabo centers his biography of the kingfisher on the Greek myth of Ceyx and Alcyone, which still provides many kingfishers with their scientific genera: Alcyone, grief-stricken by the drowning of her husband Ceyx, dives into the sea, killing herself--as kingfishers dive into the water to find a meal. Like Ceyx and Alcyone, Szabo describes, kingfishers are mongamous birds who share responsibilities with their mates--though perhaps the ancient Greeks did not know that they are frequently found in polycules with a third "helper" male.

Other cultural depictions outlined by Szabo include the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King, the Apache legend of the Fox and the Kingfisher--and, of course, Hopkins' poem. A long chapter is devoted to the Chinese practice of tian-tsui, in which the shining turquoise barbs of kingfisher feathers are painstakingly glued into ornate headdresses and jewelry. A similar practice in Angkor Wat, Cambodia, Szabo tells us, seems to have decimated the kingfisher population there--an early example, perhaps of man-made ecological collapse.

More than anything, Kingfisher--and I expect, a lot of the books in this series--provides a lot of fun knew knowledge. Did you know that the kookaburra will eat snakes too large to fit in its stomach, letting them dangle from its beak until their heads are digested and they can finish swallowing? Or that the design of Japanese bullet trains is borrowed from the kingfisher's familiar beak, which, studies show, is perfectly made to minimize the sonic booms produced by air resistance? The other principle pleasure the book provides is simply the many colorful photographs of these "family-centric kamikaze killing machines," as Szabo describes them. It's easy to see why they captured Gerard Manley Hopkins' attention all those years ago.