Bird of the Month: Dipper
The dipper ( Cinclus cinclus) was formerly called a water ouzel – no relation of the ring ouzel, which is a member of the thrush family.
Among birds, it is one of the most remarkable: the only fully aquatic songbird, in that it actually feeds and can escape underwater. It sings at every season, not least in the depths of winter, its first eggs often laid in February.
It was winter, near freezing, I’d walked through a forest of firs when I saw issue out of the waterfall a solitary bird.
It lit on a damp rock, and, as water swept rapidly on, wrung from its own throat supple, undammable song. Kathleen Jamie, from The Dipper
Film reveals how the dipper can swim to feed, using its wings like flippers; how uniquely it is adapted to water. Its dense plumage, unlike those of other songbirds, is waterproofed by an enlarged preen gland. Also unlike other songbirds, its bones are solid, to reduce buoyancy. Membranes protect its eyes, and special muscles enhance underwater focus. Flaps seal its nostrils, and haemoglobin concentration in the blood stores oxygen. Glacial water is not a problem.
Longer legs and sharper claws enable it to withstand currents. Underwater, it forages for larvae, fish eggs and small molluscs for up to half-a-minute at a time. Even its calls are pitched to be heard above the torrent rush.
The cleaner the water, the better; so it favours fast, boulder-strewn, invariably upland streams and rivers. Territories, fiercely defended, can be from half a mile to two miles long; the more plentiful the food, the more songs it sings – as few as five and as many as nine. The mossy, domed nest is often under a bridge or curtained by a waterfall. Dippers have cocked tails like their wren relative and both sexes are boldly plumaged.
The water-woosel next, all over black
as jet, With various colours, black, green,
blue, red, russet, white, Do yield the gazing eye as variable delight As do those sundry fowls whose
several plumes they be. Michael Drayton, from The Poly-olbion (1622)
Bird of perpetual motion, among the musics of water. Breast-puffed conductor, spivved up, taking its constant encores. Then down it goes again, under, where? – then up, unexpectedly – there! – on another boulder: a flick of rotundity, a minor shower of shattered crystal, then the curtsey, curtsey, curtsey. Thank you, thank you. You are most kind. Sometimes a scrap of water song, a mingling with the Lugton’s trickletones, rippled away downstream. Then suddenly! – sip! sip! – goes birring past you upstream… Gerry Cambridge from Cinclus cinclus ( Aves, 2007).
The 2019 Bird of the Month calendar is available from www.carryakroyd.co.uk
Interviewing Posy Simmonds is a bit disconcerting because you have the uneasy feeling she already knows more about you than you are ever going to find out about her. She reads people as accurately as any social historian; she can tell who you are from your handbag, for goodness’ sake.
Her new book, Cassandra Darke (review, page 49), about a Scrooge-like art dealer, is, like all her work, filled with characters we all know – so much so that people often think she must be writing about them when she isn’t.
Simmonds is in her early seventies but she knows exactly how teenagers communicate, what your outfit says about your class and why you chose your car. How does she do it? She reads magazines: Heat, Closer, Hello!, Tatler, Vogue and more. She travels on buses so that she can listen to conversations – she is a brilliant mimic and has a phenomenal memory for a turn of phrase – but eavesdropping has become less rewarding. ‘It is hopeless now – everyone is looking at their phones and not talking at all.’
Her father was a farmer and she was the middle of five children. ‘It was good training, I learned my place in the world – I was the youngest for a time and then, when my brothers went away to school, I became the oldest.’
She would escape from her siblings by sitting and reading under a table which was covered with a cloth, people would forget she was there and she would hear the adults gossiping.
‘This was where I first learned about life, that marriages came to grief, that people died, that couples had problems.’ Simmonds is very funny but she is quiet and unassuming and people can still forget that she is listening and quietly remembering things they say. Her father was partly responsible for her gift of observation; they used to walk together. ‘He would teach me to listen to birdsong and to look at what was growing and how the earth was better in some places and bad in others where there were only thistles.’ He had a saleroom where pictures, mirrors and huge bits of furniture would accumulate. ‘He had a very good eye.’ Her mother was clever, taller than her father, slim and elegant. Simmonds’s sister got the tall gene, she laughs ruefully (she is 5ft 3in). Simmonds went to school in Berkshire where she was hopeless at maths and science but did A-level art in one year instead of two. There she produced a brilliant take-off of Woman’s Own. Her version was called Herself and she drew all the pictures and wrote all the articles and advertisements – including a poem by ‘Patience Sarong’ ( Oldie readers might remember the weekly poems by Patience Strong). One ‘advertisement’ – a close-up of a pretty blonde with red lips framing white teeth – was for a toothpaste called Missionary; ‘Does good work in dark interiors,’ reads the caption. Another ad is a drawing of a young woman in jeans and a bra, hanging from a noose. The text goes, ‘I dreamed I was lynched in my Curvyform bra.’ Needless to say, none of this went down well with the teachers but, when she showed me the magazine, I was so bowled over by the brilliance of it that I heard myself saying, ‘Oh you could have been a writer!’ – before I
remembered that she was. Simmonds went to the Sorbonne to study ‘civilisation’ and then to the Central School of Art and Design where she studied for four years, during which time she met her husband, Richard Hollis, a revered graphic designer.
She remembers that, as an art student, she used to wear chef’s trousers bought in Soho and white cotton waiters’ jackets dyed in different colours, and that she was particularly proud of her shiny, black, PVC raincoat.
These days, her regular shops are agnès b, Fenwick – ‘Seems I have been going to Fenwick for decades’ – Harvey Nichols, Uniqlo, M & S, Toast… Her everyday outfit for work (which takes place on a big drawing board in the basement with a mirror over it, so she can try out gestures and facial expressions as she goes) is trousers, T-shirt and espadrilles or other comfy shoes. She particularly loves shoes.
She always wears separates because she is really two people, she says. ‘My top half has a long neck and slim arms and a very small waist, but my bottom half belongs to another much shorter, dumpier person… I used to feel like the Lake District, with a lot of things going on in a small area.’