Going back a few years, I used to walk religiously along a section of the canal in West Byfleet, to help rehabilitate my back. I still ought to do it every day. For a few months in the autumn of 2006 and winter of 2007 I used to see a kingfisher almost daily. It was always miraculous. I had barely  seen one in my life before. I got to know it well,  watching it sitting on branches, dive for fish, and streak horizontally low above the surface the water, up towards the lock, to get away from me.  Once I followed one, perhaps the same one, as I walked along the three miles of the canal into Woking. It always kept 20 yards ahead of me. Then one day, it was gone. I glimpsed one briefly again on the canal just once, last summer. I really hope that the predictions don’t turn out to be right, and that kingfishers have survived our hard, icy winter unscathed, after all.

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