This is a lovely book to hold and to read. It doesn't take long to read. Crowley has the definition of the sudden sighting of a kingfisher down to a T:

‘Blue flames, searing shades of blue, the most startling, the most strident, the most breathlessly beautiful BLUE’ (page 4).

I have experienced these emotions and adjectives once or twice while walking round a nearby lake and river. The electric blue has to be seen to be believed.

Crumley’s analysis of frustration also resonates with me and can be applied to butterflies as well as kingfishers. Many books and articles I have read about sightings of butterflies have happy endings. The hunter finds the quarry - say, a Lady Granville fritillary - just at the last minute under mist and cloud cover. That doesn’t happen to me, in particular when it comes to purple emperors or the Duke of Burgundy. I am not sure how much time I have spent over the last few years trying to find the latter. Some of the websites seem quite secretive about the precise locations of colonies or is it just that I am useless at interpreting grid references? I have seen plenty of cows, cowslips and small whites. I may have seen some of the Dukes but could not swear that on the Bible. For that reason I am very sympathetic to Crumley’s statement, page 29:

‘An undercurrent of frustration attends these fast fly-pasts, and somehow the level twitches up a step or two if it involves the off-on-off sorcery of a flight from shadow to sunlight and back to shadow’.

It is all in the flight. ( )