also known as the american dipper but fuck that lol. this is a drab grey but real cool bird. they’re the only perching bird (to my knowledge) that has become adept in the water. they swim with their wings (called aquaflying in birds) and clamber on riverbed rocks underwater.
i wish i’d gotten a better look but i only saw them at a distance, while hiking out to see a waterfall in the olympic rain forest. i often ask for people to relate their stories of these birds in comments but i’d especially like stories about these ones.
there’s an idea in zoology that “anatomy is not destiny” – that animals can do things or go places you would not expect of them just based on how they look. the classic example is goats in trees, another is humans swimming. water ouzels do not have webbed toes and look much like any passerine bird, but iirc they do have some subtle evidence of aquatic adaptation – like denser bones? idk.
expertise welcome below…
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipper#Adaptations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_dipper#Description_2
Sat on a mountain stream bank, watching a dipper work the opposite stream side – on rocks, underwater,pausing on rocks to do its classic dipping movement (I know you prefer ouzel, but to me their dip-dip is name-worthy). When it got opposite me, it started, flew about 10 feet downstream, and continued on its way. I see them often in the Cascade Mountains.
I’ve seen the European variety quite often, to the extent that when one of my bird watching brothers came to stay, wanting to see various birds that he didn’t see in and around London, I was able to take him to a stream where I knew there’d be a dipper. That particular stream is the first moving water you come to heading out into the Peak District from Sheffield with a bus stop nearby, and on sunny days there can be quite a lot of people there, with a fair number messing about in the stream. The dipper goes on working that stream, just flying past any noisy kids or adults to the next quiet stretch, then when it gets to the end of it’s patch it flies back to the beginning and sets off again. I do love the dipping which is relatively easy to see if you find a dipper it being their thing, but seeing them swim is harder and needs the patience to work out where they are likely to swim, then sit in a suitably discreet spot hoping you’ll be lucky.
Them’s the kind of comments I wanted – direct experience of the beasts. Thanks! Interesting they can be more suburban. Only place I’ve seen them was half up a mountain like the WIESS.
That stream isn’t suburban, it’s just that there’s a bus stop nearby, the bus goes from Sheffield along the Hope Valley turning at Castleton. The stream is just after you come out of Sheffield, but the border is at least a couple of miles past where the houses end. It’s an odd thing about Sheffield it has a surprising amount of moorland within it’s city boundaries. Anyway there’s a pub there all on it’s own, called the Fox Inn which the bus stop outside, and back in the day – the 80s – you could get there for 2p (yup tuppence), because the council were very keen on people using public transport. You only have to walk a few hundred yards from the stop to the stream, and I think that’s one of the reasons it’s so busy, people have a history of coming out there.
that’s a british-ass story right there