﻿THE BIRDS OF THE GENUS CINCLUS AND THEIR 

 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTE >N 



By LEONHARD STEJNEGER 



The dipper has always occupied a prominent place in my affec- 

 tion ; he was one of the earliest bird friends of my boyhood. Almost 

 as far back as I can remember that cheerful fellow reared his 

 young loss than two hundred yards from the house where wc used 

 to spend the summers. The dipper's nest was the first bird nesl I 

 ever discovered. It was placed under an old stone bridge across a 

 rushing mountain stream where we bathed and fished, just high 

 enough to be out of my youthful reach. The dipper was also the 

 first bird I drew and painted from nature, and curiously enough, 

 when the question as to the various races of the European species 

 arose more than thirty-five years ago, and old Professor Jean Ca- 

 banis asked me to get him a specimen for the Berlin Museum, the 

 dipper's was the first bird skin I ever attempted. 



Later the highly peculiar and aberrant morphological character- 

 istics of the genus Cinclus attracted my attention. As an oscinine 

 bird with the downy covering and diving faculty of a water bird, 

 the dipper certainly is an anomaly, and the various positions given 

 to the genus by the bird classifiers attest how puzzling its relation- 

 ships are. Even at this late day there is no absolute certainty as to 

 its most intimate affinity. We need not worry about the alleged 

 proximity to such birds as the Motacillidse, on the one hand, or 

 Seiurus, on the other. The timaliine similarities sometimes hinted 

 at may also be dismissed with a light heart. The majority of ornith- 

 ologists of to-day divide upon the question whether the dipper is 

 more closely allied to the thrushes (Turdidse in the wider sense) 

 or to the wrens. Twenty years ago I inclined in the latter direction 

 and wrote (Standard Nat. Hist., iv. Birds, 1885, p. 505) that the 

 clipper " in appearance, movements, nest-building, etc., is a gigantic 

 wren." It is certainly true that in these particulars it resembles 

 the wrens sufficiently to make that particular view a tempting one, 

 but on reconsidering the structure I am coming back to Professor 

 Baird's dictum that the " Turdidse, Saxicolidse, and Cfnclidse are 

 all closely related to each other by the presence of common charac- 

 ters " (Review Amer. Birds, 1, 1864, p. 1). It is well to remembei 

 in this connection that Professor Baird placed Sialia in the Saxi- 



421 



