It’s the most spectacular of Tasmania’s birds. A gem of a creature which sparkles and shines as it dashes about the state’s West Coast waterways.
The azure kingfisher has always been in my sights but for years I had not had the opportunity to search for it, beyond a cursory hunt along the banks of the Gordon River out of Strahan one summer.
Now the hunt was on in Bathurst Harbour in the far south-west with tourist cruise operator, Pieter van der Woude, whom I think was as keen as I was to see the tiny flash of light.
Van der Woude, the owner of On Board Adventure Cruises, was transferring a vessel to the harbour from Hobart for the summer season and invited me to come along.
It’s difficult to put into words the beauty of the kingfisher, a mere 18 centimetres in length, a tiny size which belies its large reputation among birdwatchers, and its long history of folklore and myth which predates the arrival of the first Europeans to these shores.
The long-lost Aborigines of the west coast for thousands of years knew of its beauty and mystique. In fact, the name of one of the halts along the West Coast Wilderness Railway, Teepookana, is taken from the Aboriginal name for the bird.
When I first went in search of the kingfisher some years back I thought the halt on the King River would be an obvious starting point but I learned the river is still seriously polluted from historic mining operations in the area.
The kingfisher, like the tiny fish it hunts, has long been gone from this location, so I searched instead from the decks of cruise vessels on the nearby Gordon River, but drew a blank.
So here I am in Bathurst Harbour on my latest kingfisher hunt, with Van der Woude, no mean amateur birdwatcher himself, wanting to add the kingfisher to his birdlife cruise itinerary, to go with the orange-bellied and ground parrots and the southern emu-wren.
For two days we searched the harbour margins and the banks of rivers flowing into it. We went ashore just once, and trekking along a stream, we heard a squeaking “pip-pip-pip,” the rapid call of the kingfisher. And a male flashed by. Through the native laurel and tea tree overhanging the stream, we could just make out the blue of the kingfisher’s back and its orange undersides. In shadow, the kingfisher’s dazzling iridescence did not shine but it was a kingfisher all right, a long enough sighting for me to record it in my life list of birds spotted. Soon I had to return home on the flight out of Melaleuca, and as I looked down at the tannin-stained waters of the harbour I envied Van der Woude going in a search for the elusive kingfisher again.