The Water Ousels
TA RIPPLE and plash and murmur of water running so -.7 clear among the rocks lured me to rest on the green sward by a little fall. A child could step over the stream, which was scarcely half a mile from its source on the northern slope of Dunkery. In the sunlit solitude of the valley, by the oaks and ash trees with their warm boles and branches and guarded buds, it was pleasant to lean over the pool and drink the bright water, to lift and loosen through one's fingers the scoured gravel of its bed, to watch the bubbles rise and slide away from the tail of the fall. Lying there with the sun on my back, it seemed to me as though the light was broken into many glittering birds beating their wings in the water ; and the stream sang and sang, until all my mind was a rill of music.
Suddenly I heard, above the water-sounds, a noise like a pebble striking a shillet. Then over the glitter of ripples I saw the beat of short black wings, and a bird alighted on a rock eighteen inches away from my eyes. The black toes of its fragile feet were lapped by the fall- shaken waters. By the snow-whiteness of its chin and t-laroat and breast, I knew the water ousel, or dipper.
The bird jerked its short tail, and flew a yard up the stream. It sang as it walked down a sloping rock into the water, and when it had gone under I lifted my head. I saw a blurred pied image moving into view. It became a diminished dipper, walking on the stones of the bed, which it grasped with its feet. It stopped, and turned over a stone, taking a caddis-grub, stuck around with a shell of gravel, in its beak. The beak was lifted, and the dipper saw me through ten inches of water. It turned, and flew through the water, oaring itself with its wings ; , and then a whiteness gleamed in the midst of broken water, and the dipper flew up. Drops thrown from its wings flashed in sunlight. Jitt ! it cried, speeding up the valley in sturdy flight, and following the way of the water. Jill ! Another cry by my feet, as a second bird flew past with a drumming of wings.
Stepping over the stream, I knelt on the bank, and peered at the moss that hung, glimmering with drops, beside the fall. The height of the overhanging rock from the water to the swarded bank was little more than a foot, and I scanned it, inch by inch, until I saw what might have been the opening of the nest. Gently putting a finger into the wet moss I felt a single egg, warm from the laying. I drew it out slowly, in dread lest it be crushed between fingers which had lost the sensitive touch of boyhood, but it came safely to the palm of my hand, and rested there a moment, a delicate and unspotted white, before rolling back into its nest-lining of dry oak leaves— a nest cunningly founded and hidden, for it was impossible to determine the woven from the growing moss.
Water ousels haunt all the rocky streams running off the moor, and in spring nearly every culvert by which the lanes cross the waters of the valleys has its beard of moss hanging from a stone-space or a ledge under the arch. I have a happy memory of such a nest just above Luckwell bridge in Somerset, in May, 1925. The old stone culvert was about to be pulled down for a new bridge of iron and concrete, to bear the heavy motor coaches of the holiday season. The young dippers were yet half- fledged ; one yellow maw had poked out, and tried to swallow my finger, when I lifted the loose moss-strands in the opening. The road-menders told me that any day orders might come from the District Council to begin the work ; and I said that I supposed when that happened, the nestlings would be crushed or drowned ? " No," said the old man I spoke to, as though it might be of a matter as usual as the removal of his coat before be- ginning work, " They birds be God A'mighty's cocks and hens, and us'll put the li'l birdies where th' ould birds med feed them."
Day after day I passed by the culvert, but the ferns on the parapet, the hazels and brambles on the banks by the arch, stood as before, and no work was begun. A fort- night later, as I was wading to the nest, a young speckled dipper fluttered out with a sharp cry, and dived into the water ; and as I was staring at the ringed splash, another flew out with a cry, and vanished in a splash. Jill ! Jitt ! the parent birds were standing on rocks ten yards away ; and hearing them calling, the three remaining fledglings fluttered down into the water.
God A'mighty's cocks and hens ! The dipper sips song from the stones and the water, and for me the words of an old man in Somerset make it the more beautiful.
HENRY WILLIAMSON.
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