Paddling with Kingfishers
Christine September 3rd, 2008
This is my new Werner paddle which Matthew purchased for me last summer. It has a smaller shaft and is fiberglass – light weight and very efficient. It truly makes longer kayak trips possible for me with no more shoulder strain or blisters on my hands from trying to manage a larger paddle. A couple of weeks ago we kayaked on Swan Lake which was a little over four miles total but it was effortless to me, whereas before that would been a long journey fighting the old paddle.
Our paddle on Swan Lake was a new journey. We explored the lake where we had never ventured before (it tends to get really windy very fast); exploring wide coves near the mouth of the river where it has created a kind of delta and shelters for birds and wildlife. The best moments of that paddle were accented by multiple sightings of the belted kingfisher. Coincidentally, my friend Deb over at Cloud Messenger posted one of her older poems the other day about the kingfisher. Please read this lovely piece. After reading her poem I went back to this post which I’ve been tinkering with for over a week and decided to finish it, for it is primarily concerning kingfishers. Thanks, Deb for the spark of synchronicity.
So back to the kingfisher’s cove on Swan Lake….. this was probably the first time I’ve seen kingfishers that close to really observe them for a long while. They did not particularly appreciate our presence but in turn I was able to fully marvel at their wonderful voices. What a peculiar call they have! The other cool thing about kingfishers is their sexual dimorphism or – the females are more brightly dressed than are the males. I wish I had a photo to share but they are so quick to fly. While I watched them the males vied for the optimum perches and they would fly directly overhead as Matt and I rested on the shore, our boat pulled up into the shallow water, which by the way was teeming with little minnows and crawdads, not to mention swarms of new hatches skimming the water. It had just rained a couple days prior and the sun was shining at just the right temperature. The sunlight refracted off the calm bay; offering a semblance of paradise –an apparition or rumours of glory as Bruce Cockburn once wrote. This little kingfisher cove was a place that still felt in balance and in tune with its own rhythms of the seasons. The bright flash of a blue crest in the trees was the exclamation point of our afternoon there.
A good friend of mine, when she was younger, used to work for the Forest Service as a biologist. She had a little girl at the time and used to cart Aspen around in her vehicle while she trucked out into the woods in search of kingfisher poop near the ponds and streams where she lived. She was trying to find out what the kingfishers were eating. In their own small way – namely in their droppings – they helped my friend determine how healthy the waterways were by the food available to the kingfishers. They are a very mobile indicator!
I thought of this as we paddled on the Missouri again over the weekend. As we neared the little town where Matthew’s folks live, we noticed not for the first time, the river banks still littered with half buried car bodies and metal junk for over two miles. These old cars are a common sight along Montana rivers; some of them are quite the vintage make, but they are so entangled in years of mud, rocks, and a thick mesh of briar that one could never extract the old cars very easily. Folks used to dump them down there to help reinforce the river bank or that was the word back then. Consciousness of river health did not enter into the equation. You just dumped your garbage over the edge and it was conveniently taken care of – downstream. Now the upper Missouri is an extremely important river to keep healthy, not only because it is used heavily by wheat farms and cattle ranches in the area — the life blood of the agricultural community, but it has also been known for many years as a blue ribbon trout river for fisherman who come from all over the world to fly fish here. It’s big business from Craig all the way down the river.
As we kayaked past the mostly buried car bodies the kingfishers flew with us the entire last stretch to the boat launch. They would fly ahead of us, landing in the big cottonwoods which leaned over the water. They would call back and forth and once in awhile do an impressive maneuver to catch a snack. We felt nearly like an entourage of some sort; us three on the water, a golden eagle perched in the snag above, and the many belted kingfishers as our company. Oh yes and that big trout which jumped out in front of me, so far out of the water that I think she had a notion to fly….
