{"id":10795,"date":"2012-12-26T07:35:52","date_gmt":"2012-12-26T14:35:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=10795"},"modified":"2012-12-26T09:16:15","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T16:16:15","slug":"a-pied-billed-grebe-attempts-to-dismember-a-frog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2012\/12\/26\/a-pied-billed-grebe-attempts-to-dismember-a-frog\/","title":{"rendered":"A Pied-billed Grebe Attempts To Dismember A Frog"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pied-billed Grebes are opportunistic feeders, taking large crustaceans (especially crayfish), fish, insects and other invertebrates.\u00a0 They also consume a lot of\u00a0frogs when they’re available.\u00a0 When the prey is too large to swallow whole (frogs and crayfish especially) they grasp the appendages with their beak and shake it vigorously until the limbs break off.\u00a0 I’ve also seen adults tear off bits of the body trunk of frogs to feed to their chicks.<\/p>\n

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\"pied<\/p>\n

This bird is a juvenile, still learning the finer points of consuming prey.\u00a0 This stage of plumage development is referred to as the “stripe-head stage”, for obvious reasons.\u00a0 Adults lose those stripes.\u00a0 The frog it has captured is probably one of the first amphibians the bird has had to deal with without assistance from a parent and that inexperience\u00a0seemed obvious as the young bird dealt with the frog.<\/p>\n

I’ve presented all the photos in this series in the order they were taken.<\/p>\n

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\"pied<\/p>\n

As you can see, the young frog hasn’t yet fully metamorphosed into an adult and\u00a0retains the tadpole tail.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\"pied<\/p>\n

The grebe would repeatedly grasp a limb (it tried all 5 of them several times)…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"pied<\/p>\n

and then shake the frog violently in an apparent\u00a0attempt to tear the appendage off like it has seen its parents do so many times before.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\"pied<\/p>\n

Here it’s working on the left front leg.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\"pied<\/p>\n

Other times the bird would grasp the body and shake.\u00a0 Hard!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\"pied<\/p>\n

At times the grebe would appear to rest and “think” about its next strategy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"pied<\/p>\n

And then it would begin the violent shaking all over again.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Pied-billed<\/p>\n

The bird continued to shake the frog for just under 5 minutes (based on the image time stamps) with no success in tearing any limbs off…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"pied<\/p>\n

and\u00a0then promptly and swiftly\u00a0swallowed the frog on its first attempt…<\/p>\n

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\"pied<\/p>\n

and had no trouble doing so. (image is a little soft but I wanted to show the last of the frog going down).<\/p>\n

Of course I don’t know for sure what was really going on here.\u00a0 Why all the effort to dismember the frog when, in the end, it was swallowed so easily?\u00a0 Perhaps it was mimicking the behavior of the parents that it had seen before.\u00a0\u00a0Maybe at this young age it doesn’t yet know <\/em>the limits of the\u00a0size of the prey it can swallow?\u00a0 Perhaps it was instinctive\u00a0behavior meant to increase experience in prey handling.\u00a0\u00a0Playing with its food?\u00a0 As far as I could tell the frog died almost immediately after capture so I don’t think it was an effort to kill the prey.<\/p>\n

Whatever the real reason for the behavior it sure was interesting to watch and photograph.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Note:\u00a0 This series was shot when I was younger and dumber and still shooting in JPEG rather than RAW so my processing options were severely limited.\u00a0 Some of the shots were underexposed so I had to use the dreaded “shadow-highlight” tool and it shows.\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pied-billed Grebes are opportunistic feeders, taking large crustaceans (especially crayfish), fish, insects and other invertebrates.\u00a0 They also consume a lot of\u00a0frogs when they’re available.\u00a0 When the prey is too large to swallow whole (frogs and crayfish especially) they grasp the appendages with their beak and shake it vigorously until the limbs break off.\u00a0 I’ve also seen adults tear off bits of the body trunk of frogs to feed to their chicks.   This bird is a juvenile, still learning the finer points of consuming prey.\u00a0 This stage of plumage development is referred to as the “stripe-head stage”, for obvious reasons.\u00a0 Adults lose those stripes.\u00a0 The frog it has captured is probably one of the first amphibians the bird has had to deal with without assistance from a parent and that inexperience\u00a0seemed obvious as the young bird dealt with the frog. I’ve presented all the photos in this series in the order they were taken.     As you can see, the young frog hasn’t yet fully metamorphosed into an adult and\u00a0retains the tadpole tail.     The grebe would repeatedly grasp a limb (it tried all 5 of them several times)…     and then shake the frog violently in an apparent\u00a0attempt to tear the appendage off like it has seen its parents do so many times before.     Here it’s working on the left front leg.     Other times the bird would grasp the body and shake.\u00a0 Hard!     At times the grebe would appear to rest and “think” about its…<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,334,392,359],"tags":[110,136,151,1091,1090,251,993,256,1092,1034,1093,1089,301],"class_list":["post-10795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bird-behaviors","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-pied-billed-grebes","tag-dismember","tag-feeding","tag-frog","tag-jpeg","tag-metamorphosis","tag-pied-billed-grebe","tag-podilymbus-podiceps","tag-prey","tag-processing","tag-raw","tag-shadow-highlight-tool","tag-stripe-head-stage","tag-tadpole"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-2O7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}