I was excited as I made my way to the river quite early this morning. Yesterday I had put up a screen hide between an old oak tree and a small holy bush. From this hide I had a clear view of the opposite bank and the "potential" new Dipper nest. I just knew that today was going to be great so when I arrived and there was no Dipper where I expected one to be I have to confess to being perplexed. Never take anything for granted with birds, it rarely works out the way you expect and frustration is the norm. The minutes ticked by…… total silence, eventually it was gone 10 and with every minute I felt more despair and disappointment. It even went through my head to call an end to it but having spent more than 40 hours just this week trying to solve the "where are they nesting" riddle, that would have been stupid. Then, the male Dipper flew down to me, perched on a nearby rock, sang a little song and left back up to where he had come from. What was that all about I thought? He had seemingly ignored the nest and now he had gone again. This only added to my frustration and now despair had certainly set in.
Then suddenly and with excruciating tension, there he was again, right in front of me with a beak full of moss and then…….. up he flew to "the nest." I had found it! It had been right there in front of me all along and I couldn't see it for looking, what absolutely brilliant camouflage. Then within seconds the female joined him in the hollow cavity, because that's all it was at the moment. They made an odd chuckling and bubbling sound as they greeted each other. They both came and went from the nest repeatedly for the next hour and a half, the male mostly gathering moss from the bank side and the female flying off up stream to get hers. They took it in turns to weave the moss in to the structure being formed. Sometimes they would be there in the hollow together but never for long, the male tumbling in to the water head first as he departed the female flying off up stream. Each time they swopped there was this excited new greeting sound that I hadn't heard before. There was a degree of almost aggression from the male who was obviously the boss and he bullied her into leaving whenever he arrived. On one occasion she made two attempts to add her moss but he refused to leave until his had been woven in to his satisfaction. All in all it had turned in to a pretty special morning. The male seemed to want to dunk his moss in to the water and get it thoroughly wet before he delivered it, I don't know if the female was doing this, she collected hers from further afield. I observed this behaviour last year when they were finishing off the nest. Some other interesting behaviour occurred when they reacted to a threat, real or imaginary I don't know. They both departed the nest with real urgency and fled the scene in total opposite directions, flying very low, silently and extremely quickly. I have often read that male Dipper do not help in nest building, this is obviously poor information and not accurate, I watched both pairs taking an equal part. It's obvious that over the next few weeks I am going to be able to add lots more information and as I hoped, it's all going to be very exciting.
The downside of this, if there is one, is the very difficult light that I am having to deal with so after leaving them to it at lunchtime, I went back late evening to see if it would be better then. I didn't expect to see nest building, as mentioned before, I have never seen building activity in the afternoon and evening, an interesting fact in itself. I was perhaps hoping to see if the birds chose to roost near the nest. This seemed to be the case because just before dusk the male turned up and sang to proclaim his territory. Going back to the first appearance of the male in the morning. It seems that he had flown to the nest area to check if the coast was clear so to speak, returning later with the female when they were certain that it was safe to do so.