{"id":27472,"date":"2014-10-22T07:33:45","date_gmt":"2014-10-22T13:33:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=27472"},"modified":"2016-01-26T17:24:49","modified_gmt":"2016-01-27T00:24:49","slug":"grebes-eating-feathers-including-two-graphic-images","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/10\/22\/grebes-eating-feathers-including-two-graphic-images\/","title":{"rendered":"Grebes Eating Feathers (including two graphic images)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grebes eat feathers.\u00a0 Lots of them.\u00a0 They do it intentionally and for good reason.<\/p>\n

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\"pied-billed I photographed this Pied-billed Grebe eating a small feather nine days ago at Farmington Bay.\u00a0 Following are some older images that show the same behavior.<\/p>\n

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\"pied-billed-grebe-1436 I cropped this image tightly so\u00a0that the feather in the mouth could more easily be seen.<\/p>\n

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\"western-grebe-8385\" Other grebe species also eat feathers, including Western and Clark’s Grebes.<\/p>\n

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\"western-grebe-1224-ron-dudley\"Feathers are fed to the young almost immediately after hatching.\u00a0 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\u00a0these benefits for the birds.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Some of the ingested feathers form\u00a0a plug in\u00a0the pylorus, between the stomach and small intestine,\u00a0which acts\u00a0as a strainer to keep fish bones in the stomach long enough to be completely digested.<\/li>\n
  2. Most swallowed feathers end up in the stomach lumen, mixed with food.\u00a0 They eventually (along with other indigestible matter) form pellets that are ejected through the mouth.\u00a0 The continuous\u00a0passage of these pellets through the upper digestive system minimizes the buildup of a variety of parasites that are very common there and plague grebes.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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    \"western-grebe-1021-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

    Young\u00a0grebes have an intense interest in feathers floating on the water.\u00a0 This Western Grebe chick tried to swallow this one but eventually it was rejected, probably because it was too large. Most of the feathers grebes eat are their own, pulled out during preening.\u00a0 However, if there are many grebes on a pond, lots of these feathers end up floating on the water.\u00a0 When a grebe sees one of them it will very often eat it, whether or not it\u2019s from that bird or another.\u00a0 In my experience, whenever a grebe notices one of these feathers slowly floating by it invariably plucks it out of the water and gobbles it down. Virtually all of the feathers are small, soft, contour feathers from their flanks \u2013 not the larger quill feathers.\u00a0 Grebes continually molt these flank feathers, probably as an adaptation that provides a constant supply of feathers for pellet formation.<\/p>\n

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    Note: Originally this post contained two images of a Western Grebe necropsy that showed a large mass of feathers that had been swallowed by the grebe. Due to a misunderstanding between the person who sent them to me (and mistakenly gave me permission to use them) and her employer who owned copyright to the images I\u00a0deleted those images today, 1-27-16.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Apologies for the inconvenience, especially to all those who commented on\u00a0those images\u00a0and to those who visited here expecting to see them. <\/strong><\/p>\n

    Ron<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Grebes eat feathers. Lots of them. They do it intentionally and for good reason.<\/p>\n

    Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27477,"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":[5,334,735,16,395,359,366],"tags":[2284,2281,88,397,747,2283,1793,859,2282,245,251,322,1078],"class_list":["post-27472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-clarks-grebes","category-photography-ethics","category-miscellaneous","category-pied-billed-grebes","category-western-grebes","tag-bile-staining","tag-chiicks","tag-clarks-grebe","tag-farmington-bay","tag-feather-eating","tag-graphic-images","tag-necropsy","tag-parasites","tag-pasadena-humane-society","tag-pellet","tag-pied-billed-grebe","tag-western-grebe","tag-wildlife-rehabilitation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/western-grebe-1021-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-796","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27472","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=27472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27472\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}