The American Dipper: A Superhero Hiding in Plain Sight
By most estimations, the American Dipper is a drab little bird—gray, short-tailed, with a sparrow-sized body that’s described variously by bird books as “plump” or “chunky.” Its song isn’t much either, at least to my ear—a nice high whistling and trilling, true, but just okay for a songbird. Seeing the dipper out of its natural context, you’d be hard pressed to do much more than shrug.
But that’s the thing—you rarely see a dipper out of context (context in this case being a silver-flecked, fast running creek somewhere west of the 100th meridian on the North American continent). And to see a dipper in its natural habitat is to see an animal transform, Clark Kent-like, from your mild-mannered, workaday little bird to a superbird supremely adapted to its surroundings and capable of serious feats of athleticism (chunkiness be damned).
You might assume that those feats are given away by the bird’s name, and indeed, the dipper does dip, popping down and up in the water in a movement that resembles old-timey calisthenics. What they’re actually doing is peering into the rushing creek, sometimes at the rate of once a second, to look for their prey—larval dragonflies, mayflies, mosquitoes, midges, fish eggs, worms, even small fish. They’re helped in this endeavor by several physical features: nictitating membranes that act as an extra eyelid and allow them to see underwater; scales that shut over their nostrils; an extra-high lung capacity; and a low metabolism that allows them to withstand the creek’s cold. You could say that they were built to dip, or, looking at it another way, that the creek they dip in is what created them. Either way, they perfectly fit their place.
But the dipper’s dipping is just a warm-up for the main act…
Read the rest of “The American Dipper” on Audubon.org’s Birds in the News, August 28, 2015.
