Driving down the Poudre Canyon on my way home from a backpacking trip this month, I wondered out loud what the word “Ouzel” meant as I passed a popular picnic area in the canyon. A few days later after posting the video below, someone told me. Water ouzel is the old name for American Dippers. These are fascinating birds that I had just spent a half hour watching on the hike out from a 3-day backpacking trip.

The first time I saw these birds was in 2020 in a stream perhaps 20 miles away from this month’s sighting. We were again backpacking along a branch of the Poudre River and noticed these small gray birds throwing themselves violently into rushing rapids again and again. They’d come up many feet from where they disappeared and astonishingly we concluded they must be swimming underwater.

Researching what we had seen when I got home, I realized they were American Dippers. As Cornell says at that link, they are the only truly aquatic songbird in North America.

We saw them again along another tributary to the Poudre that same year and then this year we found them on Fall Creek just above CSU Mountain Campus in Pingree Park. They are recognizable from their funny dipping dance that never seems to stop until they dive into the water. I took some video and you can see both the dance and the swimming.

Take a few minutes to watch these fascinating creatures play in this rushing stream.