In the Photo, the male keeps sentry duty in front of the nest.
It is exactly a month since I first discovered the nest site on March 3rd. The female is still sitting tight and incubation is in progress as hoped for. The male, who his taking no part whatsoever in incubation, spends the majority of his time sitting on a midstream boulder near to the nest. He flies, mostly upstream, to a favoured feeding area. He can be away from the nest area for as long as 20 minutes. On his return, which is always a noisy and excitable affair, he will invariably land back on one of his favourite spots and sing loudly for a minute or so. This singing fulfils two functions, firstly it is a signal to the sitting female that he has arrived and secondly he is singing to proclaim to any other Dippers that this is his territory. Yesterday when he arrived back, the female chose to leave the nest and immediately flew upstream, presumably to feed. What was different was that the male didn't follow her which he has done on most other occasions. He just remained sitting quietly, still on his boulder. As the minutes ticked by, again it was just 8 minutes to the second when she arrived back, splashing in to the water in front of the nest and climbing out on to a boulder. She dipped a few times, and then flew straight back to the nest, acrobatically and without pausing. Going in to the nest she always flies vertically from beneath. It is hard to report anything new during this period, but interestingly, the male seems to have stopped flying up to the nest to feed her now. He did this regularly when incubation first commenced but now she seems to go off to find food for herself.