A Bird In Its Element

Follow the poignant life story of a dipper chick, a drama set to a soundtrack of running water

- 

DEEP inside the egg she begins. Begins to stir, to live, to swallow oxygen, to eat. Her first food is her first coat, the swaddling stuff of the inside of the egg. She is blind, pink, a folded centimetre of living.

She eats her first coat, begins to grow, begins to fill the egg with herself. She eats until she reaches the first of two membranes that line the shell.

Here is a fragment of nature's genius at work. The egg was warmer inside the parent bird than it is now, now that it has been laid. In the nest the egg cools.

As it cools the membranes contract and break apart from each other, leaving a space. She breaks the first membrane and from the space between inner and outer membranes she draws her first real breath, without leaving the egg.

She breaks the second membrane. She bursts apart the shell. She stabs her mother, softly, in the belly. It is her way of letting her mother know that she lives.

But before any of that, she hears. What she hears is water. For the dipper was never born that knows anything at all of the sound of silence. The hearing of every dipper that ever was or ever will be attunes at once and for life to the sound of water on the move.

Dippers are born in places where water moves, cool, dark, water-loud places - the undersides of bridges over rivers and burns, under the dripping overhangs of river banks and burn banks, the half-black, ferny, mossy crevices of the rock walls of mountain gorges.

But she was born inside a waterfall, between the vertical watersheet and the rock of the land, in that cool, dark, perpetually water-loud space shunned by all the bird tribes save her own.