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THE DIPPER'S SONG

Posted: 04.01.20 in Articles category

Few birds in Britain sing in January. It's the central month of the British winter and most of our birds are more pre-occupied with feeding to survive than singing. Yet there is birdsong if you listen. I often hear robins, wrens and mistle thrushes throughout the month, and it's the thrush's song that most excites me as I have written before. Have a read of our November 2017 website article 'AN ACT OF GRACE' about the joy that hearing a thrush singing on a frosty morning, uplifted by "his wild melody with its short shouted phrases."

Living in northern Britain, I am privileged to hear another bird's song in the depths of winter. If I walk along local rivers, I can sometimes hear the quiet mellifluous song of the dipper. I think it's a beautiful melody and a highlight of any winter walk. And I'm not alone in that thought. Back in 1927 a former British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, wrote a delightful book 'The Charm of Birds' full of personal reminiscences about birds he had seen and heard, largely around his country estate at Fallodon not far from where I live in mid Northumberland. He too was enamoured by the dipper's song:

The dipper or water-ouzel.... is the most certain January singer, for even the hardest weather does not silence him. When the woods are hushed and white with snow, and the burn is pinched by frost, so that only a narrow dark channel of running water shows between the ice and snow at the side of it, there on some stone in the burn the dipper will stand and sing. It is water rippling over a stony bed that he frequents; the soft luxuriance of a chalk stream has no attraction for him. His song seems part of the sound of the rippling water, from which he is never far away. "I hear thee where the waters run" may well be said of the dipper. His song is very sweet and lively; it has no marked beginning or close, but goes on indefinitely. It is as if "beauty born of murmuring sound" had passed into the bird who was giving it back as song to the stream whence it had come.

What a delightful description of a bird's song. Try and listen out for the dipper if you can.

 
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