178 
but these numbers I have never seen. From these five eggs four 
young birds are generally hatched ; and, as a rule, the birds breed 
twice in the season, not more. 
The young birds are fed by the parents for some time after 
leaving the nest, and a prettier sight is hardly to be seen anywhere. 
The baby Dippers are ranged in a row on some stone or rock, rising 
from the bed of the river in mid stream, while the parent birds 
are busily hunting the stream below, returning after each successful 
raid to the resting place, where a flutter of little wings, and a 
gaping of big mouths, welcome their arrival, the said mouths 
being carefully supplied each in their turn. 
In breeding time, they seem to have the water parcelled out, 
so much to each pair; and in following the course of some of our 
smaller rivers, you may keep the Dipper flying on before you in 
short flights, from one resting place to another, till you get it a 
certain distance up or down stream, where it turns either by flying 
high over your head, or, if there is a bend in the river, by crossing 
the angle,—while at the same time it utters its single call-note, 
resembling the word Chit! Chit! If you repeat the experiment 
time after time, you will always find it turn much about the same 
place. Generally before alighting it drops into the water and 
scrambles up the stone. Always after a flight, and before taking 
another, it makes a sort of rustic bow by a jerk of the head and 
tail. 
During the late frost, while the Dipper’s relations on land,— 
the thrushes and blackbirds,—were in many cases starved to death 
for want of food, the Dipper’s larder was kept well and constantly 
supplied, as the streams where he seeks his food were the only 
places not frozen over. And it was great fun, when the thermometer 
was showing thirteen degrees of frost, to see Cinclus disporting 
himself in and out of the water, often beneath the ice, with as much 
spirit and abandon as he would show on a hot dayin July. Yet at 
the same time, he had to remove from the higher reaches of the 
river, his natural habitat, to the lower, and even got down Eden as 
far as Cargo, where one or two were shot for rare birds, being 
quite unknown in that locality. 
