{"id":54510,"date":"2017-12-12T05:36:16","date_gmt":"2017-12-12T12:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=54510"},"modified":"2017-12-12T06:45:40","modified_gmt":"2017-12-12T13:45:40","slug":"another-pied-billed-grebe-with-yet-another-crayfish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/12\/another-pied-billed-grebe-with-yet-another-crayfish\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Pied-billed Grebe With Yet Another Crayfish"},"content":{"rendered":"

Crayfish seem to be the preferred meal of Pied-billed Grebes at a local pond near my home.<\/p>\n

Five days ago I posted photos of two Pied-billed Grebes with crayfish prey<\/a> and illustrated how they deal with the threatening claws of the “crawdads”. Late yesterday afternoon I had another opportunity with the same predator\/prey combination at the same pond and this time I was even closer to the action.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Typical of their modus operandi this bird tore off the claws first. Here it’s about to rip off the right claw but not before…<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

the crayfish made an apparent attempt to defensively\u00a0pinch the bird’s jaw with the left one.<\/p>\n

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I always enjoy a closer look at the action (I can’t resist noting that I got a catch light in\u00a0the eye of both predator and prey…).<\/p>\n

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1\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

The bird turned slightly away from me while it amputated the claws so I didn’t get a very good look at its surgical technique.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Ok, both claws have apparently been removed. Crayfish have\u00a05 pairs of\u00a0walking legs, only one of\u00a0which has large threatening claws (two of the other pairs\u00a0have only tiny harmless\u00a0pincers and the other two have no pincers at all) and typically this species would now swallow the crayfish since the potentially dangerous claws are\u00a0gone and the smaller walking legs fold against the body as the crayfish is swallowed tail first.<\/p>\n

But this bird didn’t read the book.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

It continued to tear off some of the smaller walking legs. Here it grabbed one of them in its bill and shook its head violently…<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

which tore the leg from the body as the rest of the crayfish went flying through the air. The leg remains in the bill of the grebe.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

The grebe retrieved the clawless\u00a0crayfish from the water,<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

grabbed another beak-full of more walking legs…<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

and shook violently to tear them off.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

But then a marauding gull came along and ruined all the fun. The gull dived on the grebe several times, forcing it to submerge and\u00a0swallow the crayfish underwater. The grebe\u00a0dove with the crayfish\u00a0a split-second after this photo was taken.<\/p>\n

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1\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Apparently that crayfish was the grebe’s dessert because as soon as it surfaced, sans crayfish,\u00a0it began an extended grooming session (lasting over four minutes) that ended with…<\/p>\n

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1\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

a drawn-out wing and leg stretch.\u00a0Then it appeared to take a little nap as it began to digest its meal.<\/p>\n

This bird saved my day. Due to\u00a0a continuing\u00a0winter inversion the air in our valleys is thick and putrid with fog and pollution so extended birding trips are out of the question unless I head to the mountains where this time of year birds are even more\u00a0scarce than they are down here. And\u00a0forecasters are\u00a0now saying\u00a0the inversion might continue for weeks.<\/p>\n

It’s truly\u00a0depressing.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Crayfish seem to be the preferred meal of Pied-billed Grebes at a local pond near my home.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54540,"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":[334,392,359],"tags":[3728,1168,3729,2019,2232,1788,251,993,3730,256,3700,3727],"class_list":["post-54510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-pied-billed-grebes","tag-chelipeds","tag-claws","tag-crawdad","tag-crayfish","tag-feeding-technique","tag-inversion","tag-pied-billed-grebe","tag-podilymbus-podiceps","tag-pollution","tag-prey","tag-salt-lake-county-utah","tag-walking-legs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/pied-billed-grebe-5242-large-crop-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-ebc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54510","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=54510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}