Just then, in all the racket of the rain and the wind, the blue idol caught sight of me and flew.  Most Europeans live their entire lives without seeing the common kingfisher, even though it is quite common, and even though it is the continent’s most brilliant creature. 

Now, I want to see if maybe Jane can see this sparrow-sized fisherman.  The common kingfisher is a specialist – he is the master of spearing fish from a perch.  He has evolved very special tools to do this.  For example, his eyes are monocular while he stands on his perch.  This means that he can use each eye independently from the other, like most birds and reptile.  But as he strikes the water, he is able to flip special eyelids into operation, in order to do something very unique – switch to binocular vision intended to compensate for the distortion and refraction below water.

Today, we see no kingfisher.  Instead, Jane spots a marsh harrier, hunting in the marsh pond.  This marsh harrier has been migrating, marsh to marsh to marsh, from Northern Europe, and may be on her way to Moroccan wetlands, or the Nile.

Then she spots a pair of shorebirds walking along a rocky shore.  Now, Jane, who wears leather boots and is dressed in all black and sunglasses, might not admit it, but it is she who spots a pair of tall shorebirds walking along the shore, only a few feet from me.  We’ll learn that these are ruffs, shorebirds which started off in Norway or Finland, and are headed for rice paddies in Africa for the winter.

Montclair might have seen himself as rather more like the ruff than the kingfisher.  Both the kingfisher and the ruff are specialized for extracting certain foodstuffs in a certain way.  But the kingfisher, like humans, are widespread, but are specialized to live in just one certain area.   The ruff, like Montclair, covers incredible amounts of land in search of his specialty.

In the late afternoon, we return to the blue Opel, and continue into northeastern Switzerland, destination St. Gallen.  This would be the same route Montclair took, but he would be looking out the window of a gray passenger train. 

In his years as a cheese traveler, Montclair spent a lot of time looking out the windows of trains, crossing through the Alps with little more than a briefcase or a satchel.  When he crossed out of Bavaria in 1925, and into Austria and Switzerland, he would no doubt be troubled by his growing collection of run-ins with people of unusual ideas – about immigrants, about education, about Jews, about economies, about art, about homosexuals, about science.  And he could feel it in the newspapers too.  The newspapers were no longer telling the news, but were creating the news; what had never crossed a mind before suddenly became a compelling issue.  And this phenomena, which would later overtake all of Germany, began right in these mountains.