Tag: western grebe

Western Grebes Dumping Their Chicks

I haven’t posted for a few days because I’ve been in Montana for most of the past week.  I have many images from that trip and hopefully some of them will appear here in the near future. But for now I’d like to report on another grebe behavior I photographed recently.  This time it will be the Western Grebe, rather than the Clark’s Grebes in two of my recent posts.  The two species are very similar and most easily distinguished by differences in bill color (Clark’s is bright yellow to orange-yellow while the Western’s bill is yellow to dull olive colored) and coloration around the eye (Clark’s is white surrounding the eye while the Western is dark around the eye). Both species rarely fly except during migration.  In fact for much of the year they are incapable of flight because their flight muscles atrophy soon after arriving at their  breeding grounds.  So it’s my working theory that this might explain part of the reason why these grebes do so much wing flapping and stretching while sitting on the surface of the water – to excercise their relatively unused wings. Note:  In many of these images I was too close to the birds to get an aesthetically pleasing composition so in most cases the birds will be too tight in the frame.  But I think they show well the behavior I’m describing.    1/2000, f/10, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc This Western Grebe is in the middle of a wing-flap.  They look so lithe and streamlined while…

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“Rushing” Western Grebes

The ritualized displays and courtship ceremonies of Western Grebes are among the most complex known in the bird world.  One of them is called the “rushing ceremony” which includes 5 distinct phases – only one of which is actually referred to as “rushing”.  Yesterday I finally  was able to photograph this most dramatic part of the display and believe me it’s been a long time coming. Mia and I were photographing a pair of these grebes with chicks and though we both were aware of another small group of grebes a little further away I was concentrating so intently on those chicks that I didn’t notice what Mia noticed – that the behavior of two of those birds had suddenly changed.  She said “they’re going to do something” so all I had time to do was quickly aim my lens at these birds and fire away.  Without Mia I’d have missed the entire sequence.    1/2500, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc  When rushing, the two birds (usually a mated pair but two males may also do it to attract females) lunge forward and rise completely out of the water.      1/2500, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc  As their legs and feet start to churn at incredible speeds their bodies begin to become more vertical…      1/2500, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc until the birds  are almost completely vertical to the water and their feet are slapping the surface so fast (16-20 steps per second) that the slapping and splashing noise is loud and can be heard a great distance away.  The…

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Why Grebes Eat Feathers

Grebes, as a group, are known for eating feathers – usually their own.  The obvious question is – why?  There would be virtually no nutritional value in a feather.   Clark’s Grebe eating a feather I’ve photographed four species of grebes – Western Grebe, Clarks Grebe (these two are very similar), Pied-billed Grebe and Eared Grebe.  I’ve been able to document feather eating in all but the Eared Grebe.     Western Grebe parent feeding feather to young Over a period of perhaps a half hour I watched this adult feed several feathers to the chicks, who seemed almost as eager to consume the feathers as they did the fish provided by the parents.      Western Grebe chick reaching for a feather from its parent  Feathers are fed to the young almost immediately after hatching.  In fact, feathers are very often the first item eaten by newly hatched chicks of many grebe species. The purpose(s) of feather eating is unproven but evidence suggests that the behavior has these benefits for the birds.  Some of the ingested feathers form a plug in the pylorus, between the stomach and small intestine, which acts as a strainer to keep fish bones in the stomach long enough to be completely digested.  Most swallowed feathers end up in the stomach lumen, mixed with food.  They eventually (along with any indigestible matter) form pellets that are ejected through the mouth.  The continuous passage of these pellets through the upper digestive system minimizes the buildup of a variety of parasites that are very common there and plague grebes.    Pied-billed…

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