Ian Vince writes the regular Strange Days column in The Daily Telegraph and is the author of ‘The Lie of the Land‘ – a great new book that attempts to uncover and demystify the UK’s fascinating geology (he wrote a guest post for The Dabbler on the subject here.) He is also the founder of the British Landscape Club. But today Ian is kicking off a special ‘Birdwatching Wednesday’ with an account of one of the oddest twitchers you’d ever be likely to meet….
It had been a long walk through the Shropshire hills in search of fossils and, with a good morning’s work completed and a bag full of rocks, I came down through the contours to Ludlow in search of a pub lunch. Checking the map, I noticed a path beside an interesting looking woodland stream that was only slightly out of the way between fossils and my food. To fill the miles I decided to do a spot of birdwatching on my way down and was looking forward to a light hike along it in search of Cinclus cinclus – the Dipper – a small brown bird that looks somewhat like a stunted, barrel-chested Blackbird with a white bib. Dippers are tenacious birds that often perch on rocks in the middle of fast-flowing shallow streams with their tails cocked like oversized Wrens. They feed by diving and swimming – even walking – underwater to catch aquatic invertebrates; at least, that’s what I’ve surmised from the bird books because, in all my years of watching, I’ve never actually seen one.
Despite what the field guides may tell you, the most common appearance of a Dipper is as a line drawing on a ‘context board’ erected by the river’s edge – the mounted information panels that feature paintings of bucolic loveliness, of habitats teeming with biodiversity, the preferred modern term for ‘life’. The boards are usually installed after a programme of works to dredge the last few shopping trolleys out of a river and they present an optimistic vision of a habitat created by a partnership of organisations – organisations with striking logos designed to fit along the bottom of a context board. This particular panel was illustrated with an artist’s impression of what it would look like if all the interesting organisms from thirty miles around were condensed into a 300 yard stretch of river. I’ve long realised that anywhere that you can hear the white noise rush of a weir you’ll see a Dipper on a nearby context board and absolutely none in the river.
Moving on from the board, I scanned the river itself to no avail and decided to walk along the river a while. It wasn’t long before I saw someone else along the path, binoculars to his eyes, apparently studying a Mallard on the bank. I was a long way from home and looking for something specific, so what better than a local birdwatcher happy to share his insight into the birds on his patch? I made my way over and asked him if he knew of any Dippers on the river. It wasn’t long before I realised that I was talking to someone I now regard to be not only the world’s most unsuccessful birdwatcher, but – on account of his slightly swivel-eyed comportment – possibly its most drunken one as well.
He was almost completely unintelligible, except for the occasional ornithological English noun forming the victorious crescendo of an otherwise unfathomable sentence, its precise meaning slurred away like mud off a boot.
“Hrrurr gretsch pfftdf, Wagtail, mrmpgghaw (cough) azzerbunmhher, Swan”, was the rough gist of his part of the conversation which, at one point, inexplicably veered into “hhrghnngh wozzun hang glider” as he pointed at a passing microlight in the sky.
Joining the Dipper on the context board, between achingly rare orchids and damsel flies, a Heron and Mute Swan, was the ubiquitous Mallard, a species that my new friend was keen to tell me his opinion of. After about five minutes wishing I was anywhere else but there, my ears had at last started to become accustomed to the drawl of drunken expletives and general ill-will towards the world in general and winged creatures in particular: “Them ducks, frawghhhar, gnmmph vicious bastards, you harrrrunt to look out for them.”
It had started to rain by this point, but the inebriated aviphobe was in full bird hating mode; it turned out that he recoiled from blackbirds, swallows and wagtails also – their specific crimes were not spoken of, but he despised them all the same. His one-man mission to spot our feathered friends, identify and then loathe them deeply seemed to be going well. He was just raising ire at pigeons and pouring scorn on crows when he paused for a moment and asked, “You RSPB, then?” Surprised and, indeed, in fear of being branded a collaborator, I assured him that I wasn’t. Mellowing a little he explained that he hadn’t seen a Dipper for years, which is probably just as well for the Dipper.
I pulled myself away, leaving him on the river bank, wandering away as nonchalantly as I could; at one point, I had fantasized about throwing some of my fossils at him and legging it down the path. The last I saw of him, he was attempting gross abuse of a duck.
That’s one of the finest concluding lines of a blogpost that I’ve ever read.
The birdwatcher who hates birds could be one of Frank Key’s characters. I can picture him grumbling his way around Pointy Town.
“anywhere that you can hear the white noise rush of a weir you’ll see a Dipper on a nearby context board and absolutely none in the river.”
haha brilliant!
Never seen a dipper either – has anyone??
Never seen a dipper either, but for some reason I’m haunted by this little poem:
The Dipper
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 stupidly on,
wrung from its own throat
supple, undammable song.
It isn’t mine to give.
I can’t coax this bird to my hand
that knows the depth of the river
yet sings of it on land.
It’s by a contemporary Scottish poet (and nature writer) Kathleen Jamie. It works, I suppose, because it continues the great Romantic tradition of using a bird (cuckoo, skylark, nightingale) as a symbol for Poetry (“supple, undammable song”) but in the most suggestive and unportentous way.
The river that sweeps so stupidly on is something like life or time and the Dipper knows the depth of it, and sings of it.
By the way, do any old timers remember the Dipper that used to appear as a suitably enigmatic emblem or totem on Appleyard’s blog? Long gone.
By the way, do any old timers remember the Dipper that used to appear as a suitably enigmatic emblem or totem on Appleyard’s blog? Long gone.
Indeed, Jonathan – much like the Yard himself. Alas, he has gone into blog hibernation for the time being.
I believe that my thirty year wait for a Dipper was recently fulfilled when one whirred past me on a stretch of the Wharfe near Ilkley – at least I think it was a Dipper. There weren’t any context boards nearby to confirm its alleged local presence. I’ll hold off making the tick until I see one bobbing in and out of a partly submerged shopping trolley.
You haven’t missed anything. It’s a small brown bird (or sbb as they are known).
Almost any sbb will, in fact, do just as well.