A Dipper Under the Footbridge
April 13, 2025 · 3 min read
I had seen a dipper on the weir stones twice over the winter, a dark, dumpy bird with a white bib that bobs and then walks straight into the current, and had hoped. This morning I found out why it was here. Standing on the footbridge at about half past six, I saw one fly in under the deck with something in its bill and come out without it. Then the other did the same. The nest is a ball of moss wedged into the angle between a girder and the stone abutment on the downstream side, about a metre above the water, with a small hole at the bottom.
I timed twenty minutes from the far bank, where I could see the entrance without being directly above it. Seven visits in that time, four by one bird and three by the other, each carrying what looked like caddis larvae or small nymphs. On two visits a bird came out carrying a white faecal sac and dropped it in the river well downstream. So the young are hatched and probably a week or more old, which fits a first clutch laid in mid-March.
The river is high after three days of rain, brown and loud over the weir, and the birds were feeding in the shallow edge below the footbridge rather than out in the main flow. They walk under the water with their wings half open and come up a metre or two away, shake, and bob. I never tire of it. Dippers need clean, fast, stony water with plenty of insect life, so having a pair breeding here says something good about the river that I would not otherwise know.
Also this morning: the grey wagtails are back on the weir, a pair, very yellow underneath in this light. Sand martins, around a dozen, prospecting the bank where they nested last year. A chiffchaff singing from the willows and a second one answering from the garden end. A pair of mallards with the first ducklings I have seen this year, nine of them, in the slack water above the weir.
I will keep off the footbridge in the early morning for the next fortnight and watch from the bank instead. People crossing with dogs do not seem to bother the dippers, but a man with binoculars standing directly above the nest for twenty minutes might, and the pair have done well enough without me.