OUT OF SIGHT
It’s mid-January and I’m wading thigh-high through a stream, looking for kingfishers. Minnows dart before each footstep. I hear a faint, high-pitched peeping sound ahead and slow my pace. A flash of orange and cobalt blue whizzes by.
As an artist, I find the vivid pallet of kingfishers irresistible and I have painted them often. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about their behaviour, but I’ve always longed to discover what happens when these bright birds disappear underground to bring up their young in the dark.
I follow the sound, looking for a steep bank where this kingfisher might make its nest. But I find nowhere suitable and so head instead to some nearby flooded gravel pits owned by a friend. She tells me the bank where kingfishers regularly nest has collapsed and so I offer to restore it in exchange for setting up a hide to photograph them.
And so begins an ambitious project to turn a shed into an artificial riverbank. I partition the space into three – to accommodate an artificial kingfisher nesting chamber, a CCTV camera
