Common Kingfisher
Painting by Missy Dunaway. Created with acrylic ink on paper. 30x22 inches (76x56 cm)
Painting Key
Fauna: 4 Common kingfishers (Alcedo atthis), prey: 16 minnows, broad-bodied chaser dragonfly, common darter dragonfly, four-spotted chaser dragonfly, southern hawker dragonfly
Objects: barometer invented by Evangelista Torricelli (1643), 4 compasses from The Mariner’s Mirrour (1588), 8 common kingfisher eggs, 23 common kingfisher feathers
Shakespeare’s Kingfisher
Occurrences in text: 2
Plays: Henry VI Part 1, King Lear
Name as it appears in text: “halcyon”
PUCELLE: Assigned am I to be the English scourge.
This night the siege assuredly I’ll raise.
Expect Saint Martin’s summer, halcyons’ days,
Since I have enterèd into these wars.Henry VI, Part 1 (Act I, Scene 2, line 132)
The common kingfisher is a diving bird that hunts by sight, relying on elevated perches to spot prey beneath the water’s surface. Sunny conditions and placid waters provide an ideal hunting environment, making kingfishers most active and easy to observe during calm weather. The association between kingfishers and peaceful seas is ancient, rooted in a Greek myth that Shakespeare references in Henry VI, Part 1.
The myth centers on Halcyone and Ceyx, the children of gods who fall deeply in love and marry. When the lifeless body of Ceyx is discovered floating in the ocean, Halcyone is so overcome with grief that she throws herself into the sea. Moved by the devotion between the two lovers, the gods resurrect and transform them into kingfishers.[1] They also grant the birds a period of calm weather during nesting season, as kingfishers breed in tunnels dug into muddy riverbanks at the water’s edge, leaving their young vulnerable to flooding and turbulent waters. The word "halcyon" therefore became both another name for the kingfisher and a symbol of peaceful, prosperous days.[2] In Henry VI, Part 1, Joan of Arc promises to bring "halcyon days" to France by defeating the English and liberating the country from invasion.
In Henry VI Part 1, Joan of Arc promises to bring peaceful “halcyon days” to France. Illustration by Edward Corbould, Henry Cook (1837). Folger Shakespeare Library.
The myth of Halcyone inspired numerous fables that attributed elemental powers to the kingfisher’s physical form. The Greeks believed that a dried kingfisher could ward off Zeus’s lightning.[3] Gerald of Wales, a twelfth-century archdeacon and historian, claimed that a dead kingfisher’s plumage would revive in spring like the leaves of a tree, and that it would perfume clothing and repel moths when hung in a closet.[4] Shakespeare references a third belief, which was perhaps the most widespread: when suspended by a string like a plumb line, a dead kingfisher’s beak would turn to indicate the direction of the wind, like a weathervane.[5] Shakespeare invokes this image in King Lear, when Kent laments how quickly public opinion can shift, comparing the fickleness of the king’s subjects to the spinning beak of a kingfisher.
KENT: That in the natures of their lords rebel—
Being oil to fire, snow to the colder moods—
<Renege,> affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks
With every <gale> and vary of their masters,
Knowing naught, like dogs, but following.—King Lear (Act II, Scene 2, line 80)
The blue streak of a kingfisher diving into placid waters is an extraordinary sight, and one that inspired Shakespeare, who used the bird to explore concepts of stillness and motion. Halcyone found peace only in death, and the gods rewarded her with calm seas— a peace sought by Joan of Arc in Henry VI, Part 1. Meanwhile, in King Lear, a dead kingfisher reanimates to spin its beak in the wind, a terrible reminder about the public’s shifty loyalty to its rulers.
The compass rose designs included in my painting are borrowed from The Mariner’s Mirrour, the earliest collection of English nautical maps from 1588. British Library Board, Creative Commons [12]
Endnotes
[1] Ross, A., Mystagogus poeticus, or, The Muses Interpreter: Explaining the Historicall Mysteries and Mysticall Histories of the Ancient Greek and Latine Poets (London: Printed for Richard Whitaker, 1647).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Greenoak, F., All The Birds of the Air, 2nd ed, (Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1981), 179.
[4] Cambrensis, G. Topography of Ireland, 1187, ed. Wright, 1813, p. 39.
[5] Browne, Sir Thomas, Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths, 4th edn (London: Printed for Edward Dod, and are to be sold by Andrew Crook at the Green Dragon in Paul's Church-yard, 1658).