Welcome back to our ‘Reading Rivers’ series, where we explore how our waterways inspire the written word. Today we’re looking at Kingfisher: Encounters in the Wild by Jim Crumley. First published in 2018, the book documents five times that Crumley – a Scottish nature writer, journalist, and poet – had memorable meetings with these incredible birds. It forms part of his Encounters series, which includes similar books on otters, foxes, hares, skylarks, and other animals.
At just 60 pages long, this short-and-sweet book draws you into scenes that are alive with the sights, sounds, and textures of nature. Rain showers “throb through the trees” while a hidden river releases a “mocking chuckle”. Riverbanks swell with flag iris, cow parsley, meadowsweet, and willowherb. Through Crumley’s keen and patient eyes, we gain a new appreciation for the “unfurling flight” of the heron and the “punkish headdress” of the goosander.
The undisputed star of the show, however, is the book’s avian namesake. At the time of writing, Crumley had been seeing kingfishers in the wild for roughly forty years, but familiarity had done little to dampen his enthusiasm. In the five chapters – each a different river trip – he finds them diving by beaver dams, leaping from low-hanging alder branches, and whizzing past with piping calls. His unwavering excitement is truly infectious; to him, every sighting is a special one.
Chief among the kingfisher’s “considerable array of glories” is, of course, its famous plumage: the burnt orange, the creamy white, and the luminous blue. Crumley is especially enamoured with this last colour – an “icicle sheen” so bright that it “burns straight through a patch of downstream sunlight and leaves a streak of blue dazzle on the air there, like diamond dust”. The colour is so intense that he sometimes struggles to capture it in words. It is, he says, “the most startling, the most strident, the most breathlessly beautiful”.
Despite their striking beauty, Crumley is candid about how elusive kingfishers can be. He describes watching for hours – sometimes in the pouring rain – for the chance of a single glimpse. But even the time spent waiting has value: it's an opportunity to feel the rhythm of his surroundings. If he can learn to blend in, to “become riverbank”, he might go unnoticed by the wild things around him. And when the kingfishers finally arrive, the landscape is “enlivened, enriched, renewed” in just a matter of moments. The message is clear: they are well worth the wait.
Overall, this book is an evocative peek into the life of a passionate nature writer. You can borrow it from your local Hampshire library, so grab your free library card today! If you love reading about rivers, check out our other book reviews or read personal stories that local people have shared through the Tales from the Riverbank project.