An American Dippers gets ready to dip and then dips eyes wide open! Until I got to Kodiak, Alaska in the fall, I’d never photographed an American Dipper. I’d seen plenty, especially on the banks of various rivers in Yellowstone National Park but those were only brief glimpses as we drove by. Late one afternoon a couple of years ago, as I sat on the bow of a flat bottomed boat and watched Moose, Eric, and our guides Chris and Hiram, fishing for our salmon dinner, I noticed movement in the shallow edges of the river. It was an American Dipper, unfazed by my sitting just a few feet away, my hip-booted feet dangling in the water. These small birds eat lots of aquatic bugs and their larvae, dipping down into the water to snatch their feast, not unlike the Kodiak Brown Bears we were watching doing the same thing, only their prey was a tad bigger than the bugs and eggs that the Dippers were after.