I see dippers. The birds? Mainly, yeah. But other kinds, too. I’ll get to those in a moment.

I guess I’ve got dippers on the mind because our contest is ending tomorrow. And it involves a dipper that’s hidden on this website.

After mentioning on Facebook that we didn’t have the usual number of entrants, we got a boatload of last minute dipper discoverers. Not sure why Facebook’s worth something like 33 billion. But it did goose our contest.

I also see dippers that aren’t birds. Started when I walked my dog every night. I’d look at dark treetops for silhouettes of owls. And I noticed stars. I got to know the dippers. Big and little. Ursa Major, Ursa Minor.

Minor is well named, and doesn’t always show up. But you can count on Major, the big dipper. Always visible, pointing to the North Star, Polaris.

Those dippers in the night are not as interesting as the uninteresting-looking birds called ”dippers.” There are European versions, so we call ours “American Dippers.”

I saw them working in a creek that ran through a mountain town in the Rockies. Fast water didn’t faze them. They were doing what field guides said: walking on the bottom.

I’ve seen birds dive before. There’s a Pied Billed Grebe that visits our neighborhood pond. I watch it dive out of sight and pop up somewhere nearby. But the grebe, like cormorants and loons that do similar dives, are basically just swimming.

Hell, we can swim.

But how many of us can use our toenails to walk along the bottom. Against the current. That’s what dippers do. They hold their breath, grab on and walk, picking insect larvae and other bits of underwater food as they go.

The dippers in the night sky can help you navigate. But they don’t do much except show up. The dippers of the bird persuasion are stunt men.

That’s why I’m glad we received a bunch of last minute entrants for our August contest. Whether you’ve entered or not, whether you win or not, I hope you see a dipper some day.

Not one on a website, and not just the easy ones in the sky, but a real American Dipper dipping under a real American stream, walking on the bottom, then popping back up, looking uninteresting.

Until it goes under again.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 10:22 am and is filed under "Daily Sightings" A Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.