Dipper strikes a chord

Standing on the bridge of the Feagle River at Rossa Street in Clonakilty, I was intrigued to see small trout in the swim of the water, and to see a dipper fly upriver from under the bridge and alight on a rock in midstream.

After a bout of characteristic bobbing and dipping, it plunged into the current and disappeared. Dippers walk underwater. While they are not uncommon on mountain streams, it isn’t every town centre that can boast of this bird and offer the visitor a chance to observe it by simply leaning on a bridge close to the main street.

Dippers have the portly profile and short, perky tail of an oversize wren, but are very black, with a brilliant white breast. The black wings, in certain light, reveal a bottle-green sheen. Hardly had the dipper disappeared, when a grey wagtail, that very slim, very elegant member of the wagtail family, swooped upriver in its wake and perched daintily on the bank — where, of course, it began to wag its tail. Often called yellow wagtails (a separate species rarely seen in Ireland) because of their lemon-coloured breast, these birds are, indeed, more strikingly yellow than grey. From its perch, it rose every now and then almost vertically over the water to snatch a fly from the air.

The River Feagle has been highly unpopular since, swollen with rain, it burst its banks and flooded the town. It is extraordinary how much damage, and indeed heartbreak, such a small river can cause.

Standing on the bridge the other evening, watching its gentle flow and, in the silence between the outstanding music coming from the pubs — it was the Sunday night of the Guitar Festival weekend — listening to the river’s gurgles, I recalled catching trout in its waters more than 60 years ago. We would use a sack, its mouth held open by an iron hoop, and one young fella would hold it under the shelf of the bank, while just upriver another child would poke fish from under the bank with a stick. I often came home, bare-footed, with a half dozen seven-inch trout. Once, I came home with a bucket-full, because all the trout that evening were floating belly up. Realising that they’d been poisoned, probably from flax-pond run-off, my parents told me to return them to the river. I find it heartening that trout still swim and dippers still fish in the Feagle, despite the various toxic run-offs that have entered the stream over the years.

Dippers are marvellously equipped for their niche in the natural world. It seems a contradiction that a bird with passerine (perching) feet should be an underwater hunter. However, it has various tricks to keep itself immersed, not least that it always walks upstream, keeping its head down, so that the force of the current on its slanting back keeps it on the bottom. High concentrations of haemoglobin in its blood allow it to store oxygen efficiently and thus spend prolonged spells underwater. Over its nostrils, it has a flap that closes when it is submerged. Over its eyes, it has a see-through membrane, like a third eyelid, which keeps the view clear.

All this is understood, but a question still remains unsettled: Why does a dipper dip? Dip meaning bob and duck, as if it were hinged on its legs and had a compulsive disorder of some kind. One theory holds that it helps it see prey underwater (not always small fish, but nymphs and larvae, its principal diet) by peering at the surface from minutely different angles which may cancel out the problem of refraction.

Another theory is that birds are communicating with one another by dipping: Certainly, the courtship display of the male includes dipping, feather-fluffing and wing-quivering. They also sing, and it is indeed a wonderful treat to hear their wren-like thrills rise above the splashings and murmurings of a hill stream.

The other night, in a silence between guitar sets, I heard the zit-zit-zit of its call-note as it rose from the water and flew on upstream, in rapid, direct flight. After a spell, I returned to the guitars, the mellow sounds of the strings, the fluid notes of a saxophone and a piano, and voices belting out the blues.