thebirdsofamerica:

Detail of Plate 435 of John J. Audubon’s The Birds of America. This little guy is the ‘Arctic Water Ouzel.’ Regardless of where they call home, all the Water Ouzels are American Dippers now. What Audubon and his contemporaries thought were different species turned out to be normal color variation within a single species. Dippers have specialized habitat requirements. They like fast moving water, which they dive in and ‘fly’ through hunting insect larvae, and they build their nests behind waterfalls. How’s that for specialized? Yet that habitat, while small in any one area, exists in patches along most of the west of the Americas, pretty much wherever there are mountains and rain, so it makes sense they’d spread out and fill those niches wherever it can be found within flying distance of a small passerine bird. 

(via scientificillustration)