Time to take in a dip

I’M incredibly lucky where I live to have dozens of wonderful walks, many following the meandering paths of streams and rivulets.

And that means the possible presence of two families of birds – the beautiful and slender wagtails that I have talked about before and something stranger.

At first you might be forgiven for wondering why a fat blackbird is standing on a rock in the middle of fast-flowing water… until it casually walks into the water and disappears. Don’t worry – he hasn’t decided to end it all. This is the unusual dipper.

Dippers (or white-throated dippers as they are known outside the UK) live in upland habitats all over Europe, central Asia and northern India, interspersed in some places with a fellow species, the brown dipper.

In the UK they are mostly found in Wales, northern England and Scotland, while they are also scattered across Ireland.

There are 13 live sub-species, identified by slightly different colours, sizes and shapes of the brown band on their chest. The Irish dipper is found in, you guessed it, Ireland and west Scotland, while the British dipper calls the rest of the UK its home. Local names for this curious bird include bobby, brook ouzel, bessie ducker, ess cock, river pie and water blackbird.

In the 1300s all birds that dived into water were called dippers, but by the late 1600s the name belonged to this bird alone. Curiously, it was once believed by many that this bird was a female kingfisher, due to the similar stream-going environment. They are usually described as “wren-shaped, but blackbird sized” and have a voice quite like a wren, but have no family ties. They are all dark birds with brown heads and chests, with black bodies and wings, but their most striking feature is an almost circular white throat.

They have a slightly upturned, skinny black beak that is perfect for weedling out insects from between rocks under water. Yes, these birds walk into water, then “fly” along the bottom of streams eating aquatic insect larvae. This makes them unfortunately susceptible to, admittedly rare, predation by brown trout.