The dipper tends to send a few shudders down the onlooker’s well-cloaked disposition before one begins to marvel at its foraging, combing the surface of frigid waters emboldened by gravity before diving into their shallow depths for a morsel… seemingly foolhardy but in reality, one of those evolutionary ingenuities…
I knew that the brown dipper is a frequent visitor to the fast flowing waters of the Tirthan and its tributaries, so a Christmas weekend saw us going back and forth over a half-mile patch on the banks of Falchan river… and the bird came duly, every morning at around nine as the sunlight slid through the peaks to dance atop the frothing waters…
The odds are rather ironically stacked up against the dipper, one muses… for most part of the year the bird is content with hopping along a riverbed or skimming the water’s surface for food, but its breeding season coincides with the winters, and when the waters are at their coldest, the avian is forced into manoeuvre its way inside shallow pools to, well, provide for the family…
Which then ushers one into a world of fun facts that allow such daredevilry… the dipper has very high haemoglobin levels in the blood allowing it to store oxygen for underwater dives, a dense and well-oiled plumage that sheds water in an instant, long toes and claws like crampons for a secure grip on wet and slippery rocks, nictitating membrane to protect the eyes… ‘tis an impressive array to say the least…
It seems like the dipper transcends portals, air one instant and water the other, comfortable in both realms, never shirking from a cold dip… in all the din of water, one tends to forget that ‘tis a songbird, although there isn’t much melody in the various notes of trills and rattles that it emanates… the song must be of comfort to the river though, for the dipper’s prey thrive only in fast-flowing, well-oxygenated waters yet to be polluted…
Never judge a book by its cover, one ponders, looking at the rather plain chocolate brown plumage of the dipper… for all the contrast and colours that the redstarts and forktails were throwing about, ‘twas this dull looking bird subsisting with utmost creativity, albeit the kind that can be difficult to discern when ensconced in humility…
Musing on a Brown Dipper (Cinclus pallasii), Tirthan valley, Himachal Pradesh
