Two Big Dippers to Feed!

Dippers and the relentless search for food for two demanding offspring

The Nedd Fechan river in the Brecons is famous for its succession of lovely waterfalls, tumbling through steep wooded gorges of the Neath valley. The clean, fast flowing rivers here also provide ideal conditions for dippers, who hunt among the mossy stones and underwater, for caddis fly larvae and other invertebrate food. In late May I came across a parent bird working the river in an attempt to satisfy the hunger of its two fully fledged chicks.

The well-fed ever-hungry dipper chicks

Dippers are thrush size birds with chestnut brown back and distinctive white bib. They are often seen flying just above the river surface from one stony perch to another, bobbing vigorously as they land.

Dippers are one of the few birds that use their wings to effectively fly underwater but they also dive and walk along the river bed in search of prey.

Caddis fly larvae are a favourite source of food and great numbers need to be caught and prepared in the breeding season when the dipper parents have hungry mouths to feed.

Caddis fly larvae live under stones on the river bed and protect their soft bodies with a sheath of armour formed from small stones or pieces of twig and this protective coating needs to be removed to make the larva palatable to the chicks.

The dipper flicks the larva against a stone to deftly strip off the covering .....

......  and reveal the soft bodied insect within.

But despite just having been fed, the chick persists in demanding more food and receives a disapproving look from its exhausted parent who must dive straight back into the river. A look many human parents will empathise with!