By: Jessica L Graham

I’m about half way through my second field season and have been questioning how to start this blog with all of the dipper stories from the past 1.5 seasons. Today, a dipper made that choice easy! Meet the bird that is (unofficially, until January 2026) the oldest American dipper on record.

The story actually begins yesterday. I’ve been periodically checking eBird for dipper sightings and noticed someone had seen five dippers on May 10. Under normal circumstances, this means it is likely a fledged nest that I didn’t know about – so I really wanted to scope out the area.

When I arrived, I did see a banded, adult dipper, but it wasn’t one of the birds I’ve banded. I knew this had to be one of Nancy Drilling’s banded birds from 2017-2018, so when I got back to town, I looked up this bird and found this male was banded as an adult in 2018 and his estimated age was ‘ASY’ or ‘After Second Year’.

With American dippers, we can put fully flighted birds into three age categories. Their juvenile coloration lets us categorize them as ‘HY’ or ‘Hatch Year’, meaning they were born that summer. This coloration is very obvious next to an adult. When juveniles molt at they end of the summer, they retain their primary and primary covert wing feathers. Next to the new feathers, the retained feathers look brown and worn. This difference in coloration and wear can be used the year after they hatched to categorize birds that are a year old as ‘SY’ or ‘Second Year’. When the one-year-olds molt at the end of their second year, there is no longer a morphological way to distinguish how old they are. We classify these birds as ‘ASY’, meaning they are 2+ years old.

The North American Bird Banding Program tracks longevity in North American species. Currently, the longevity record is held by a female American dipper (also from the Black Hills) that was 8 years 1 month old. The male I saw yesterday and today is 8 years 11 months – with just over a week until he turns 9! I reported the sighting to USGS and, as long as we don’t discover any dippers older than him by January 2026, he will be added to the Bird Banding Laboratory’s Longevity Records during the next update.

Citations:

Bird Banding Laboratory. North American Bird Banding Program Longevity Records. Version 2023.2. Eastern Ecological Science Center. US Geological Survey. Laurel, MD.

Kingery, H. E. and M. F. Willson (2020). American Dipper (Cinclus mexicanus), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (P. G. Rodewald, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.amedip.01

Photo is my own, apologies for the blurry cell phone photo!