Mine and my Dads first trip out for 2013, and a new bird. We have both seen Dippers before but not the Black Bellied variant. It was a bloody cold morning, -8.5 when I left home to pick my Dad up, on site it wasn't long before my dad found the bird feeding in an area just inside the wood just off the bridges. The light was awful and I had to manually tweak the settings just to get some half decent images. A lovely dumpy little bird that was feeding very actively, it seemed to be picking out fly larvae from the leaf litter on the river bed, and it was very good at doing that. On half the findings it seemed to go behind the dam, I don't know whether it was stashing them or not? It would swim on the surface before diving, giving a impression of an auk in the water. A great morning, shame about the cloud cover but lucky for us this long staying bird stayed to brighten our day.
