White-Throated Dipper | Cinclus cinclus

Voice

The song is a long, sustained rambling warble in which clear notes and grating ones run together, with a creaking, almost electric quality — chee-chrit-churr-chee — pitched exactly where it will carry over the roar of the water. Both sexes sing, and unlike most songbirds they sing right through the year, including on frozen January days. The call is a short, hard zit or dzik, usually given in flight, and usually the first thing you notice: a bullet-shaped shadow shooting low over the water with a sharp zit-zit attached.

Identification

Squat, short-tailed and dark, about the length of a Starling but far rounder and heavier-looking. Head and nape are warm chocolate-brown, the back and wings slate-grey with fine dark scalloping, and throat and breast carry a large, sharply cut white bib. Below it, birds of the British Isles and the continent show a chestnut band running into a blackish-brown belly. The stubby tail is cocked like a Wren's, the legs are heavy and the toes long, with strong claws. The bird is almost never still: a constant deep bobbing at the knees, punctuated by a flash of white eyelid that carries across the noise of the water. The plumage is very dense and greasy — about half as many feathers again as a Blackbird — and the preen gland above the tail is large; the bird works its oil through the feathers for long spells and keeps them waterproof. Underwater a flap closes the nostrils, a transparent third eyelid slides across the eye, and a heavy skeleton with little air in the bones holds it down on the bed.

Confusion species

Nothing else in Europe is really in the running: no other songbird dives. At a distance a Blackbird or Starling on a midstream rock can pass for a moment, but neither bobs and neither shows white. Common Sandpiper works the same boulders but is long-legged, pale below, and teeters from the rear end rather than at the knee; Grey Wagtail shares the stream but is slim and yellow. The genuine pitfalls are within the species. Juveniles are dull slate-grey with a dingy white throat lacking a clean border, finely scaled underparts, and no chestnut at all. The subspecies differ too: birds of the Ardennes, the Eifel, the Alps and the Pyrenees show the chestnut band under the white bib, while the northern birds from Scandinavia are blackish-brown straight below the white. Such black-bellied birds also reach the Low Countries in winter.

Habitat

Fast, clean, well-oxygenated water over gravel and boulders: trout streams, mountain streams, the small rivers of the Ardennes and the Eifel, and in the south the headwaters of the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian mountains. Rapids, shallow riffles and rocks that break the surface are what matter; still water, a silted bed or a straightened, dredged channel are of no use. It feeds by walking on the bottom, into the current with its head down so the flow presses it against the gravel, prising caddis, mayfly and stonefly larvae and freshwater shrimps out from under the stones; large birds take small fish too. Built structures count: weirs, mill leats, sluices and bridge arches are part of the daily round. The nest is a domed ball of moss with a side entrance, set behind a waterfall, in a bank wall, under a bridge or against a weir, often where the bird can only reach it through the spray. It starts early: the first eggs are already laid in March.

Range and movements

From the British Isles through Scandinavia, the Ardennes, the Eifel, the Black Forest, the Alps and the Carpathians to the Balkans; south into the Pyrenees, the Cantabrian mountains, the Iberian Central System and the High and Middle Atlas; eastwards the range runs well beyond the edge of this map, through the Caucasus and the Iranian plateau into Central Asia and the Himalaya. On the British Isles it is a resident of the north and west, and it is essentially absent as a breeder from the flat, slow-flowing lowlands east and south of a line through the Midlands. Birds are highly sedentary, most staying within a few kilometres of where they hatched, though Scandinavian birds move south and west in autumn and reach the Low Countries and eastern England. In Iberia it is a numerous resident of mountain streams in the north and interior — the Pyrenees, the Cantabrian range, the Sistema Ibérico, the Sistema Central, the Montes de León and, more locally, the Sierra Nevada and the Baetic ranges — but it is absent from the plains of the Meseta, the Mediterranean coast and the arid south-east; there too it is markedly sedentary, dropping to lower stretches in winter only when the headwaters freeze.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

How and when to look

Go in winter, between November and March: the water runs clear, the banks are bare and the birds are already in song. Pick a fast stream with boulders and a weir or an old mill leat — in the Ardennes the Ourthe, the Amblève or the Hoëgne, in South Limburg the Geul and the Gulp — and walk it slowly and watch for two things — a short hard zit low over the water, and a white spot on a midstream rock that will not keep still but bobs. Bridges are the reliable places: stand on one, look at the underside of the next one downstream. Then sit down and wait. A Dipper works a fixed circuit of rocks and will be back within a quarter of an hour, often to within ten metres. From March to June keep away from bridges, weirs and waterfalls where a nest may be tucked in.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened, but everywhere a measure of the stream it lives on. It disappears where water is polluted, acidified, straightened or drawn off for small hydro schemes; acidification in Wales and southern Scandinavia showed how fast that happens, because caddis, mayflies and stoneflies drop out of acid water and there is then nothing to take. In South Limburg the needle points the other way: since the water quality of the Geul and the Gulp improved, Dippers have been showing up there regularly again, and the streams themselves are now more suitable than they have been for decades.

Scientific name

Cinclus cinclus | (Linnaeus, 1758)

Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Sturnus cinclus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Cinclus was introduced in 1797 by Borkhausen. Cinclus is from the Ancient Greek kinklos, a classical name for a small tail-wagging bird living by the water. The specific name repeats the genus name. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sweden.