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The dipper is not afraid of cold

 

 

The things nature has invented to keep species alive in severe winter conditions! 18 degrees of cold and a crazy creature just dives! This kind of temperature in a refrigerator makes it a freezer.

 

The dipper who has its Estonian name, vesipapp, “water vicar” from the likeness of the plumage with a vicar’s robe, does not bother about the degrees of cold. Diving into icy water in winter  is normal for it and necessary for survival. In the water it is actually warmer too. The dipper is the only Estonian passerine that dives for food and that is able to run counter-current on the bottom of a fast-flowing river or creek.

 

 

Dippers usually arrive to our rapidly running river stretches in late October from Scandinavia; about ten pairs of the Norwegian national bird nest in Estonian waters too.

 

The long and cold nights the bird spends in some hollow at the river bank. It is said that dippers in fact choose their mate in the wintering sites so that they can head for the North already in March and build a nest in their birth country.

 

You can for instance go to the old power plant at Nõmmeveski and study the rapids.  At Vasaristi or Taevaskoda or Keila-Joa they are certainly present too now.

 

Sculpins belong to the menu of the dipper

 

The menu of the dipper comprises invertebrates in the water, small fish and also the fry of larger fish species. In the belly and in pellets undigested remains of sculpin, river trout, stickleback, salmon, bleak, ninespine stickleback, belica, roach, bream and silver bream have been found. The dipper looks for bottom-living invertebrates under stones, rolling them aside to fetch the caddisfly larvae, freshwater shrimps (Gammarus), waterlice, dragonfly larvae and other creatures that have crawled into hiding there  up to the  ice edge, to devour them there. Any salmon or trout roe grains that might turn up are perfect for a bite too.