Do you shiver when you look outside at 7:30 a.m. to see a shirt-sleeved middle school toughie walking to the bus stop … and you realize it’s about 19 degrees?!?
That’s how I felt last week while watching an American dipper in the Ogden River near The Oaks restaurant. I was bundled in winter gear, but seeing that bird dip merrily in winter water amid ice-capped stones chilled my bones. What’s that bird made of, anyway? Certainly not the technical base layers, thick thermals, wool-lined jacket and Thinsulate’d boots that I was wearing.
The American dipper is an oddity in the bird world. It’s a perching bird, but it forages for aquatic insect larvae under water. It plunge-dives and snorkels, but it’s not a duck or a loon or a grebe. It’s a plain gray bird, but it has a colorful personality. The American dipper is a bit of a misfit, albeit an engaging one.
Just watching for a few minutes provides proof of the bird’s strangeness. I initially saw the dipper because it plunge-dived headfirst facing downstream, and the underside of its tail wagged vertically above the surface as if it were standing on its head and trying to balance. The bird was in constant motion afterwards, plunging, wading, running, snorkeling, swimming and of course, dipping its whole body on springy legs while pausing to preen between bouts of foraging. It stood on rocks or small ice shelves that protruded above the riffles midstream.
Those mossy and sometimes icy rocks showed how popular the section of river is with dippers, or more likely, this particular dipper. The build-up of white droppings in splats and streaks implied this is the bird’s well-used territory, which has not only bubbling and rushing water, but also caddis fly larvae and other aquatic prey species.
Sometimes the bird leaped off a rocky dome and bulldozed through the current, running like a human might when chest-deep in a swimming pool. But the dipper also submerged its head and was engulfed by a great silver bubble as it plowed through the water, throwing cascades of diamond drops with each movement.
The bird was submerged only to its toes during some foraging sessions and gave me a momentary view of small objects in its beak that it had probably plucked from the sides of submerged rocks or beds of leaf litter. Then the morsels disappeared down the gullet.
Those full-body views let me appreciate the bird’s corpulence. Dippers are chunky due to a generous girth and short proportions. The species is only as long as the biggest sparrows, but plump like a quail. The cold weather also caused the one I watched to fluff its feathers to trap even more warm air within. This bird looked positively porky.
Studies have shown dippers are adapted to their cold and wet microhabitat with a lower metabolic rate and a higher feather density than other songbirds have. Not only do they have more feathers by number, but they have more downy body feathers — insulation — than other songbirds. Even dippers’ eyelids are feathered. It’s unlikely that icy water ever reaches this species’ skin.
Researchers have also concluded the dipper is a songbird closely related to the thrushes, the wrens and the starlings. My observations, however, point to another conclusion: The dipper’s closest relative is the bird-fish from Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer’s Island of Misfit Toys, a creature that demonstrated its abnormality by diving into a goldfish bowl and swimming around. That’s scientific proof of the taxonomic relationship, I say. After all, you’d never see thrushes, wrens or starlings snorkeling, plunge-diving, or scampering underwater across gravel river beds.
I watched the dipper for more than a half-hour from a rocky bar while leaning against a boulder at an angler’s access to the river. Even though it was a startling sunny day, the winter sun probably doesn’t reach the canyon’s depths and the super-cooled moist breezes wafting upriver began to take their toll. My gloved fingers tingled painfully and went numb until I fisted them inside the palms and held the binoculars with my stumps while I watched the bird’s antics and tried to restore feeling to my fingers.
That dollop of gray feathers and hyperactivity had an advantage. I sure wish somebody would make gloves out of the same stuff that makes up the American dipper.
Kristin Purdy can be reached at gobirding@comcast.net.
