Water Ouzel

As my mother and I sat eating our lunch a mile or two up Tassajara Creek from the village, a little bird landed on a rock that jutted out at the head of a waterfall. I saw it only for a moment, slate-colored, slightly smaller than a robin, with a cocked, triangular tail. “I knew it”, as Mary Oliver says “from the pages of a book; it was a dipper”. 1

I had never seen an American Dipper before, though I had looked several times this summer, waiting by rushing streams, trying to imagine a bird that would call this torrent hospitable. Dippers can swim, using strokes of their wings, twenty feet underwater in currents swift enough to knock me over.

So excited was I to have seen a Dipper, that my chatter startled it off again, and it flew downstream. We walked more slowly then, my mom and I, letting our fleet slide along the bottom to find the surest footing, and relying heavily on our walking staffs for balance.

But the little, agile bird seemed to grow accustomed to our presence, and soon we were able to watch as it landed on rocks mid-stream and bobbed its body with quick bends at the ankle. We watched it land in the water and walk along the bottom, snorkeling, its third, white eyelid drawing closed to protect its eyes from grit and debris. It was making a meal of the stonefly and caddisfly larvae whose cast off casings we had seen earlier along the rocks.

When we got too close or made too sudden a movement, the dipper flew ahead, genuflecting from the top of a rock before continuing to search for lunch.

John Muir loved these “darlings of Nature” he knew as the Water Ouzel, and wrote about his encounters:

“Here I find the little water ouzel as much at home as any linnet in a leafy grove, seeming to take the greater delight in the more boisterous the stream… its song is sweet and low, and all its gentleness, as it flits about the loud uproar, bespeaks strength and peace and joy…. A yet finer bloom is this little bird than the foam bells in eddying pools. Gentle bird, a precious message you bring me. We may miss the meaning of the torrent, but thy sweet voice, only love is in it.2

Our gestures, my mother’s and mine, bespoke joy surely, but our walking in the creek held neither strength nor peace. “Oops, I was talking again,” my mother said as her attention shifted away from her footing. She reached out to catch her balance on a rock and sat mid-creek with a look of surprise and delight. We laughed, startling the Dipper. She levered herself upright with the staff, and we paused then to pick blackberries, sun-warmed, before feeling our way forward again.

1. Mary Oliver, “The Dipper,” Owls and Other Fantasies.
2. John Muir from My First Summer in the Sierra.