DIPPERS: WATER-OUZEL 
533 
In Alaska, Alfred M. Bailey has also found the Ouzels in winter, 
near salt water, where the tides keep the streams open. In the spring 
time, he tells us “the joyous voiced males can be heard a great distance, 
as their beautiful songs blend with the rhythmic note of rushing 
waters” (1927, p. 364). 
In New Mexico in cold October, when Mr. Surber wrote, “I have 
enjoyed watching a Water Ouzel from my cabin window”; he added: 
“ It would dive under the water and stay there from three to five minutes 
at a time, and between dives come to the top and swim around” (MS). 
Before diving the Ouzels sometimes locate their food, Mr. Burcham 
states, dipping the head at intervals beneath the surface (1904, p. 
50). The larva of a small black fly that attaches itself to submerged 
stones and sticks is apparently a favorite food, and after locating one 
from a rock in midstream the Ouzel dives above it and, letting the 
current carry him back past the stone, tears off the larva as he goes by. 
In diving, as the Bryants say, the Ouzel starts head first for the bottom, 
but when he comes up his oily feathers seem to shed the water like 
magic. In swimming he paddles alternately, his unwebbed feet 
seeming to furnish plenty of power to move his buoyant body (1915, 
p. 99). 
Although habitually feeding on insects attached to submerged 
stones, one of the Ouzels has been seen by Enid Michael hunting over 
snow slopes about a lake where rosy finches were foraging, running to 
and fro,“pausing here and there to pick up frozen insects” (1926a,p.45). 
When a pair of Colorado Ouzels were feeding their young in the nest 
they were watched and photographed, as never before, by Doctor 
Cordier. In the icy water he built a platform six feet from the nest. 
“From this continually sprayed perch,” he tells us graphically, “clothed 
in waterproof garments, the camera protected by a rubber cloth, I 
stood for many hours making ‘stills’ and ‘close-up’ moving pictures 
and observing the birds.” The mother fed the young about eight times 
an hour. When she was on the nest and her mate came with food, the 
young reached out from under her breast to take it. In hunting for 
food, the old birds would “scale the water-splashed, glazed surface of 
the almost vertical cliff” within a few inches of the massed waters of 
the fall, gathering food as they went. This was made possible by the 
character of their feet constructed like ice creepers, with long claws 
and strong flexor muscles. 
In his moving pictures, Doctor Cordier showed the much-discussed 
movement of the nictating membrane, a “glistening, pearly white, 
translucent, moist fold of the conjunctiva,” which is “called into action 
to clear the cornea of the watery mist while the bird is near the spray 
and splashes of falls and rapids.” The pictures show the movement 
to be “from above downward, nearly the horizontal width of the upper 
