The Story
This is a White-capped Dipper (Cinclus leucocephalus) that I photographed at the Río Blanco reserve near Manizales, Caldas, Colombia on June 24, 2017. It lives along rocky, fast-flowing mountain streams with clear water. It is a semiaquatic songbird of South America, sooty brown with a white throat and white eyelids. The Río Blanco reserve covers 4,932 hectares of cloud forest on the Central Andes, about 3 kilometers northeast of Manizales.
I photographed it with a Canon EOS 70D and the EF400mm f/5.6L USM, at 1/1000 sec, f/6.3, ISO 800. IUCN lists the White-capped Dipper as Least Concern with a stable population, and BirdLife International lists Río Blanco as an Important Bird Area, protected because its forest supplies about a third of the drinking water of Manizales.
©2020 Adam Rainoff Photographer
The bird
The White-capped Dipper (Cinclus leucocephalus) belongs to the family Cinclidae (Dippers) in the eBird/Clements taxonomy.
Source: eBird.org (opens in a new tab)
Conservation
Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (assessment published 2024), with the population trend listed as stable. Source: IUCN Red List