306 THE DIPPER 



Only when a hard frost seals up the hill streams does the dipper 

 move down towards the deeper waters of rivers, estuaries, and lochs, 

 or to the seashore, 1 on which occasions it is compelled, however 

 reluctantly, to subordinate its anti-social prejudices to the categorical 

 imperative of its appetite. A few may then be seen together, each 

 pair or individual no doubt eyeing its neighbours much in the way a 

 gamekeeper might be expected to eye a poacher, when they happened 

 to meet one another unprofessionally. 



The dipper's distaste for society during the autumn and winter 

 months appears to have its root in the feeling that a given stretch of 

 watercourse will supply adequate means of living for one or two 

 individuals of the species and no more. In possession of a good 

 stretch of stream, he has little to fear from hunger. He has less to 

 fear from cold. Unlike the rest of his Order, he has, in the course 

 of generations, developed beneath his feathers a thick vest of down 

 resembling that of typical aquatic birds. In midwinter, when the 

 thrush, starling, and other Passerine species sit silent in lean despair, 

 the dipper may be seen more rotund than ever, perched, it may be, 

 on some floating block of ice, warbling to himself an inward meditative 

 strain that has in it something of the free, careless music of the 

 brook, tempered by a note of pious satisfaction that tells of a clear 

 conscience resting securely upon the triple basis of a sound digestion, 

 a healthy appetite, and a full larder. 



If when spring comes round the dipper finds himself un- 

 mated, he must perforce set forth to seek a wife. If she is 

 not to be found on the same stream, he must either remain 

 unmated or, in knight-errant fashion, go win a dusky bride amid 

 the tumbled rocks and rippling shallows of some distant stream. 

 The necessity for these love-quests in cases where a stream is the 

 haunt only of one or of an uneven number of dippers, explains 

 perhaps some of the erratic excursions from its haunts that the 



the dipper, when disturbed in autumn and winter, utters the clinking call-note, which would 

 scarcely be the case if it were solitary. 



1 J. A. Harvie-Brown, Fauna of Tay Basin, p. 08. 



