With a quote by John Muir on the back, shown below: Card size 4” X 5.5”
Water Dipper
Cinclus mexicanus
"Find a fall, or cascade, or rushing rapid, anywhere upon a clear stream, and there you will surely find its complementary Ouzel, flitting about in the spray, diving in foaming eddies, whirling like a leaf among beaten foam-bells; ever vigorous and enthusiastic, yet self-contained, and neither seeking nor shunning your company." So wrote John Muir of the delightful little bird he knew as the Water Ouzel. This cheerful creature, the only aquatic songbird, is found in the United States from the Pacific Coast to the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Clear, unpolluted mountain streams are his home, and there he sings joyously all through the year and through every kind of weather. Declared Muir, "Among all the birds, none has cheered me so much in my lonely wanderings — none so unfailingly....When water sings, so must he..."
The water dipper amazes us with his underwater acrobatics. He dives headlong into turbulent, icy water, disappears into thundering waterfalls, forages for insects under pounding rapids, and "flies" underwater for twenty feet or more. Special physiological adaptations allow him to live near and in the water, even in below-zero temperatures, and he seldom leaves it. Even his nest, an oven-shaped sphere of mosses and fine grasses, is built so close to a fall or rapid that it is almost constantly sprayed by mist.
When perched on a rock or along the edge of a stream, he bobs rapidly up and down; in Muir's words, he "begins to nod and courtesy like a wren, turning his head from side to side with many other odd dainty movements that never fail to fix the attention of the observer."
Drawing by Jonathan Machen. Published 1983 by The Water Ouzel Press, 1110 First St., Los Alamos, New Mexico 87514.
With a quote by John Muir on the back, shown below: Card size 4” X 5.5”
Water Dipper
Cinclus mexicanus
"Find a fall, or cascade, or rushing rapid, anywhere upon a clear stream, and there you will surely find its complementary Ouzel, flitting about in the spray, diving in foaming eddies, whirling like a leaf among beaten foam-bells; ever vigorous and enthusiastic, yet self-contained, and neither seeking nor shunning your company." So wrote John Muir of the delightful little bird he knew as the Water Ouzel. This cheerful creature, the only aquatic songbird, is found in the United States from the Pacific Coast to the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Clear, unpolluted mountain streams are his home, and there he sings joyously all through the year and through every kind of weather. Declared Muir, "Among all the birds, none has cheered me so much in my lonely wanderings — none so unfailingly....When water sings, so must he..."
The water dipper amazes us with his underwater acrobatics. He dives headlong into turbulent, icy water, disappears into thundering waterfalls, forages for insects under pounding rapids, and "flies" underwater for twenty feet or more. Special physiological adaptations allow him to live near and in the water, even in below-zero temperatures, and he seldom leaves it. Even his nest, an oven-shaped sphere of mosses and fine grasses, is built so close to a fall or rapid that it is almost constantly sprayed by mist.
When perched on a rock or along the edge of a stream, he bobs rapidly up and down; in Muir's words, he "begins to nod and courtesy like a wren, turning his head from side to side with many other odd dainty movements that never fail to fix the attention of the observer."
Drawing by Jonathan Machen. Published 1983 by The Water Ouzel Press, 1110 First St., Los Alamos, New Mexico 87514.
