Heading North

Every Spring, or rather every Easter which for obscure religious reasons moves around a lot, we head up to Scotland for a week. This Easter is really early and so the weather was always going to be challenging with the forecast being more Winter than Spring. We started off this year with an overnight stay in Northumberland before pushing on to cross the border. We stayed at the Lord Crewe Arms, which I can heartily recommend as being comfortable, having good food and more importantly has dippers in their back garden!
The hotel is on the Northumberland moors in a small village. As soon as we had checked in I got the boots on and headed out to cross the bridge next to the property and walk down the small stream. It looked perfect for dippers, small, fast flowing and on high moors. I wasn't disappointed. Within about  a minute I heard the characteristic call and saw a small brown blob flash down the middle of the stream and land on the far bank.

Dippers are one of my favourite birds. They have that indescribable ability to look characterful. For those less familiar with them, they have an almost unique lifestyle, living on rivers and feeding underwater by finding aquatic insets to eat. You normally see them though bobbing up and down on rocks in the middle of the flow, their white bib showing them up from some distance away.

There was at least one pair of this stretch, as they kept chasing each other up and down, some of the behaviour seeming aggressive, some a bit more like pair bonding. They were certainly always busy flicking up and down the banks.

The last thing to point out about dippers is their normally hidden side. When they go under water they  have a special white eyelid which comes across their eyes. This is termed a nictitating membrane, and strangely no one seems to know what it is for. Even more remarkable, this eyelid is covered in tiny white feathers!

Anyway, the weather was setting in and I needed to get back before our evening meal so I left the dipper sitting on a rock waving me goodbye before we set off for Speyside in the morning.