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In Praise of the Dipper

The American dipper, a whitewater ranger from Mexico to Alaska

By Jerry Dennis

From the moment I first saw a mountain river I was smitten. It was in the Beartooths, in 1972, and I was 17 years old and had just driven from northern Michigan with my friends John and John, pausing only for gas and piss stops until we reached the high foothills and pulled over at the first river we encountered. It roared through a canyon shaded by pines and firs and was so unlike my home rivers that it seemed a different category of watercourse altogether. I don't recall if I caught any trout that day, but I will never forget the plump gray songbird I watched hunting along the bank. It was always in motion, hopping among the rocks or bobbing in what appeared to be deep-knee bends and finally, to my astonishment, diving into the torrent and swimming away underwater. I fell in love with mountain rivers that day, and with the American dipper as well.
Fast rivers are so alive with movement, color, light, and music that they draw us irresistibly. We want to become intimate with them, to embrace them, to immerse ourselves in them, inspiring us enter them in waders, canoes, kayaks, and inflatable rafts.
But wildlife choose them for more practical reasons. A whitewater rapids is saturated with dissolved oxygen, making it a bountiful place for aquatic insects, crustaceans, and mollusks, which in turn attract predators such as trout. Phoebes, flycatchers, swallows, and other songbirds range above the rivers or along their edges, but only a few can handle the water itself. The dippers - five species on four continents - are the only passerines adapted for swimming and walking underwater in fast-flowing, cold-running rivers.
The dipper is solitary, staking out about a mile of river for its territory, and is distinguished for living a semiaquatic life without any obvious advantages for it. Other than a nictitating membrane over each eye, scales that seal the nostrils while underwater, and a large preening gland at the base of the tail used to waterproof its feathers, it appears to be better suited to suburban lawns than mountain torrents.
Yet the dipper lives year-round along whitewater rapids from southern Mexico to northern Alaska. Key to its success is a layer of down that insulates so effectively that on warm days the bird must stand in cold water to keep from overheating. During the winter it sings cheerfully during blizzards and swims in water rimmed with ice.
The dipper is so committed to its environment that it prefers to follow river courses faithfully rather than take even a short bypass overland. It feeds, rests, courts, and mates beside or in running water and builds its domed nest of moss at the edge of the water - on the underside of bridges, the top of midstream rocks, or, frequently, beside or behind waterfalls. Often its nest is so near falling water that the constant spray keeps the moss alive and growing. From the moment young dippers hatch they are steeped in the sounds and scents of the river.
All those years ago in Montana I fished the same stretch of river every day for a week. I waded the edges, casting imitation stoneflies across a surface jumping with whitewater, and caught many rainbows and browns. Often I found myself in company with a dipper that hopped among the rocks, exploring every cranny with single-minded absorption, then flew around me, its wings nearly touching the water, or half-flew and half-hopped past. A few times I saw it plunge beneath the surface, disappearing for 10 or 15 seconds, then pop to the surface and jump to the top of a rock, where it gave a brisk shake to dry its feathers. Once it dived into the river at my feet and strolled along the bottom with its wings held out for balance.
John Muir, who counted the dipper among his favorite birds, entertained the idea that its fluid song, bobbing motion, and seeming cheerfulness were not just reflections of the streams where it lived, but characteristics that sprouted organically from the water, "like flowers from the ground." That romantic idea has intriguing implications. If we, too, come to resemble the places we inhabit, we could do worse than to live near mountain rivers.

JERRY DENNIS has written about nature for Audubon, Smithsonian, the New York Times, and many other publications. His 11th book, a meditation on winter, will appear in 2011.