Every February, volunteers walk the banks of the Animas River counting American dippers — small, bold birds that dive headfirst into rushing rapids and spend their entire lives along river corridors. Because dippers feed on the aquatic insects that can only survive in clean water, they serve as a living indicator of river health. The American Dipper Project launched in 2016 following the Gold King Mine spill, and citizen scientists have been tracking nesting behavior and success rates ever since, entering all data into Cornell Lab of Ornithology's NestWatch database. When nesting success declined after the 416 Fire in 2018 and subsequent flooding, the dippers reflected that environmental stress. This story is sponsored by Durango Gelato, Coffee & Tea and The LOR Foundation.
If we have dippers nesting successfully and in, in larger numbers that would indicate that the health of the river is good because they're eating the bugs in the river, the, the aquatic macro invertebrates. And that would tell us that if the aquatic macro invertebrates can survive in the river, that the river quality, the water quality is likely to be better. So it's a good indicator of water quality.
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So we're counting dippers on the Animas River because they are a bird that's indicative of the health of the river. And specifically this project began the American Dipper Project in 2015, actually in 2016, the, the spring after the Gold King mine spill because there were concerns about what the quality of the river might be following all of the heavy metals that went into the river and how they that could potentially impact species in the river. We're really excited to have this many volunteers this year. And so dippers are obligate to rivers. They, they spend their whole life on the river corridor, very rarely stray from the river or from the, the stream banks. So it's another good reason to look at them. And they're so fun to watch 'cause of their antics. If you, you've watched them, you know, they're constantly hopping into the river, hopping back onto boulders, diving into really dangerous looking rapids and then flying out of the river. They just come flying right out there. We are. That was one. Okay. We'll most often find them on a rock, sometimes below the bridge. They're just quite wonderful 'cause you can find them by their call like that. Each year we do a, a count in February to get a sense of how many birds are out there. And then as we continue on, we're actually looking at their nesting behavior. So we're looking at how many attempts they make at nesting and then how much success they have. Each nest is considered successful if there's one dipper fledgling at a nest. Okay, fantastic. Well, yeah, good start. Yeah. Very fortuitous to have two of them right here.
They have an extra eyelid and they use it kind of like we'd use a goggle if we go underwater. So when they go underwater, they can pull that goggle down and see underwater.
If I don't see a dipper in our river here, after I've walked many, many places, I am heartbroken because, you know, that's where they belong. And then we're losing that special bird in this
Area. It's a citizen science project, citizen science meaning not an academic project. And we're really just trying to understand how the health of the river is, and you know, what the diverse might tell us about that. So we have noticed that it, after the four 16 fire, there was less success of the dippers in terms of their nesting behavior. And then again, in the recent years, we've noticed also that there have been fewer attempts at nesting on the river. Our goal is really to better understand the river and the species that depend upon it, like the American Dipper. And then we're also trying to understand and, and contribute to the data about American dippers across the country, really across the world by inputting all of our data into Nest Watch, which is a, a monitoring program of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that's trying to better understand bird biology and reproductive behavior. We will be doing monitoring all through the spring. So if anyone's interested in being part of the American Dipper program and becoming a volunteer, which you can go out and do on your own, once you've learned how to do it, then it would be great to have them contact the American Dipper Project.
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