WILDLIFE OF THE WEEK
American Dipper
I have spent the last week returning to a place that has held a special place in my heart for decades. I first visited Montana at the age of seven or eight or nine, and knew even then I was witnessing a nature and outdoors the likes of which I had never seen before. Huge conifer forests, massive open plains, pleistocene megafauna like antelope and bison, massive, stately, intimidating mountains that made New England’s Mt. Washington look like a glorified hill. Having since lived here for years at a time during my professional travels, I’ve made many “friends” among the plants, insects, birds, and other animals, and am always delighted to be reunited with such old friends whenever I come to visit. This morning, while enjoying cold air and the soothing sounds of water at Snyder Creek in Glacier National Park, I heard a familiar sound over the rushing and babbling. It was the voice of the American dipper, historically known as a Water Ouzel, a gorgeous and unique little songbird with an incredible love for water (as a fellow water-lover, I probably feel some kinship there). Curiously found only in the American West, dippers are our only truly aquatic songbird, like a little robin or flycatcher that loves to swim, and is never seen far from water. These astonishing birds stick to large and fast-moving rivers year round, surviving even in the frigid cold of winter. They build elegant little nests of moss and mud in summertime, often on rock cliffs over the water and typically near waterfalls.
While I shivered in layers of wool sweaters and jackets, my little friend dove happily amongst the rocks of the creek, surfacing every now and then dry as could be with an aquatic insect in their bill. I was reminded of John Muir’s ecstatic essay about this splendid bird, which is worth a read if you haven’t come across it.
An American Dipper, photographed by Flickr user Blingsister, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Snyder Creek at Glacier National Park. I heard it from many yards away, flowing high from last week’s thaw, just this morning.
LATEST BLOG POST
This past week, I finally got around to finishing a long overdue (overdoo?) post on animal droppings. While not necessarily the most intuitively attractive subject, as you’ll learn from this post, poop is an important topic for interpreting nature. While many organisms, from insects to fungi and birds and plants, are fairly easy to spot in the wild, mammals, for the most part, are not. While our noses aren’t sensitive enough to intercept and interpret their many chemical communications, we can easily enough spot their droppings. These tell us a lot about different animals, and sometimes are conspicuously placed as part of that communication I mentioned earlier. What might seem like an unattractive or stinky mess is often enough a treasure trove of important information on who’s around, what they’ve been eating, and how long ago they were around. Identifying and interpreting wildlife poo, or more professionally put, scat, is a great naturalist skill, especially for backyard naturalists. In this post, you’ll get info on some of the lingo and vocabulary used for describing scat, what to look for when interpreting it, and where you’ll often find scat and why.
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Subnivium (n.) - The space between fallen or packed snow and the ground, often occupied by a diversity of animals during long winters. For example, many moles and voles construct tunnels in the subnivium to forage on grasses and roots all winter long while hiding from surface predators.
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