The Kingfisher

Wildlife photographer Charlie James is an expert on the kingfisher: a beautiful blue-green bird that lives near streams and rivers,feeding on fish.
Old trees overhang the stream, half shading shallow water. Soft greens, mud browns and the many different yellows of sunlight are the main colours, as soft as the sounds of water in the breeze. The bird cuts like a laser through the scene, straight and fast, a slice of light and motion so striking you almost feel it. It has gone in a split second, but a trace of the image lingers, its power out of proportion to its size.
Charlie James fell in love with kingfishers at an early age. A sure sign of his depth of feeling for this little bird is his inability to identify just what it is that draws him to it. After all, it is the stuff of legend. Greek myth makes the kingfisher a moon goddess who turned into a bird. Another tale tells how the kingfisher flew so high that its upper body took on the blue of the sky,while its underparts were scorched by the sun.
There is some scientific truth in that story. For despite the many different blues that appear in their coats, kingfishers have no blue pigment at all in their feathers. Rather, the structure of their upper feathers scatters light and strongly reflects blue.
This is why a kingfisher may appear to change from bright blue to rich emerald green with only a slight change in the angle at which light falls on it. It's small wonder that some wildlife photographers get so enthusiastic about them. Couple the colours with the fact that kingfishers, though shy of direct human approach, can be easy to watch from a hideout, and you have a recipe for a lifelong passion.
Charlie Jame’s first hideout was an old blanket which he put over his head while he waited near a kingfisher's favourite spot. The bird came back within minutes and sat only a metre away. But it took another four years, he reckons, before he got his first decent picture. In the meantime, the European kingfisher had begun to dominate his life. He spent all the time he could by a kingfisher-rich woodland stream.
The trouble was, school cut the time available to be with the birds. So he missed lessons, becoming what he describes as an 'academic failure'. But his interest in this, the world's most widespread kingfisher and the only member of its cosmopolitan family to breed in Europe, was getting noticed.
At 16, he was hired as an advisor for a nature magazine. Work as an assistant to the editor followed, then a gradual move to life as a freelance wildlife film cameraman. What he'd really like to do now is make the ultimate kingfisher film. 'No speech,just beautiful images which say it all,' he says. 'I'm attracted to the simple approach. I like to photograph parts of kingfisher wings ...'
The sentence trails off to nothing. He's thinking of those colours of the bird he's spent more than half his life close to, yet which still excites interest. The photographs succeed in communicating something of his feelings. But, as Charlie knows, there's so much more to his relationship with the kingfisher than his work can ever show.