Even I am beginning to feel that I just a bit obsessed about getting a good Dipper photo. Today it almost happened though. The weather is not the best at the moment and knowing how important light is when it comes to photography, I was expecting too much today, but then you never know. I decided to try a different area of the river  and I was almost immediately rewarded. I wandered down the stream, still not feeling 100% because of a tiny bit of a cold and a chesty cough which is annoying me to say the least. I haven’t been feeling my best for well over a week now, and I am looking forward to getting back to normal. Making the most of the peace and quiet was really what this outing was about.  The height of the river is still low despite a tiny bit of rain, yet again the met office got it totally wrong, they promised us a drenching!  As I approached the Dipper “spot”, the Jays screamed out from their oak tree as normal, seeing me way before I noticed them, as usual. They sound a lot like parrots when they scream.  It is remarkable how secretive they are, rarely giving even a glimpse of their presence which is odd as they have such noisy calls.  Under their Oak tree which overhangs the water, was a Dipper and he hadn’t seen me yet! I quickly sat down and put the cam netting over me and then watched him. He was still too far away, I have hundreds of shots of Dippers “in the distance” and this is not what I am after. After a few minutes I couldn’t see him but then after a short while, he returned to feed in the shallows opposite. They are really interesting to watch as I have said before, but my luck is not holding out with this species because yet again, even though he was closer, he was in the dullest part of the stream and any decent shot was a definite impossibility. He found a caddisfly larva under the water. These are interesting insects. They camouflage themselves with fragments of rock and debris which doesn’t deceive the Dippers because they make up quite a big proportion of the their diet. 

I took lots of pictures even though I knew they were going to be mainly useless and then he disappeared. This was my cue to position myself in the the roots of the Oak tree right next to the water and only a few feet from where I had seen him yesterday, and then I just sat it out and waited……. guess what? He didn’t return. On my wander back home a couple of hours later I saw him, just like yesterday feeding again in the shallows. I covered myself and crept like a man half my age across the sandy shingle at the edge of my side of the River. I got quite close to him and again managed a few slightly better shots in the still dreary light.

They are getting better but still not as good as I want!