{"id":55803,"date":"2018-01-16T05:49:11","date_gmt":"2018-01-16T12:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=55803"},"modified":"2018-01-16T06:27:13","modified_gmt":"2018-01-16T13:27:13","slug":"strange-bathing-behavior-from-a-pied-billed-grebe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2018\/01\/16\/strange-bathing-behavior-from-a-pied-billed-grebe\/","title":{"rendered":"Strange Bathing Behavior From A Pied-billed Grebe"},"content":{"rendered":"

After this many years of observing birds carefully I seldom see behaviors that are new to me in common species. But 12 days ago I\u00a0did.<\/p>\n

Bathing in water (as opposed to dust baths)\u00a0is a common behavior in most birds but I’ve only occasionally seen it in Pied-billed Grebes. I’ve wondered if that’s because they spend so much time diving, although that doesn’t make much sense because ducks and coots\u00a0often bathe and\u00a0many of them\u00a0dive\u00a0regularly. But it wasn’t just that this grebe bathed that piqued my curiosity – it was how<\/em> it bathed.<\/p>\n

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1\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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 first caught my attention when it\u00a0raised up in the water and held this unusual half-submerged position for some time. As you can see from the lack of water disturbance there was no bathing activity at this point.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

In the next shot\u00a0(and others)\u00a0the grebe was still doing the same thing – there is still no bathing activity.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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, while still in the same unusual position, the bird began to perform what appeared to be\u00a0high frequency vibrations with its body that sent disturbance out into the water similar to those which might be produced by\u00a0fairly high frequency sound waves.\u00a0At this point there\u00a0was no wing flapping or head bobbing as birds typically do when bathing and it continued to do this for some time.\u00a0Notice the almost complete lack of true waves or ripples in the water disturbance as we would expect from typical bathing.<\/p>\n

I’ve centered the grebe in the frame so\u00a0more of the water disturbance on both sides can be seen.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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 then slowly rotated its body in the water while continuing to maintain the unusual body position and angle. This shot was taken when there was a near-lull in the vibrations so the water disturbance is less obvious.<\/p>\n

Up to this point I didn’t even associate the behavior I was seeing with bathing. I thought something else might be going on.<\/p>\n

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1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

Then the grebe eventually\u00a0began to bathe more typically by dipping its head into the water and flapping its wings a little to get everything wet. But this didn’t last long before it…<\/p>\n

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1\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

resumed that unusual position and angle in the water again and held it for quite a while. Eventually the bird swam off and resumed normal activities.<\/p>\n

Cornell’s Birds of North America Online does mention this\u00a0species assuming an “upright position in the water, body half-submerged” while bathing but they say the birds flap their half-submerged wings during the process which this bird didn’t do.\u00a0Neither did it do any head bobbing\u00a0until much, much later and BNA\u00a0makes no mention of anything like the “vibrations” that I apparently witnessed.<\/p>\n

It’s a little thing, I know and perhaps much ado about nothing. But I may have spent more time with Pied-billed Grebes over the years than I have with any other species and this unique bathing\u00a0behavior definitely\u00a0caught my attention because it was so different from anything I’d seen before, from grebes or any other species for that matter.<\/p>\n

So I thought some of my readers who are as bird-geeky as I am might be interested in it too. If any of you have witnessed this behavior\u00a0(“vibration” combined with the unusual half-submerged body angle held for an extended period) I’d appreciate knowing about it. After all, just because I haven’t seen it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unusual.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

After this many years of observing birds carefully I seldom see behaviors that are new to me in common species. But 12 days ago I did.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55807,"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":[393,5,334,395,359],"tags":[47,251,993,3361],"class_list":["post-55803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bathing-bird-behaviors","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-miscellaneous","category-pied-billed-grebes","tag-bathing","tag-pied-billed-grebe","tag-podilymbus-podiceps","tag-strange-behavior"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/pied-billed-grebe-6719-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-ew3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55803","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=55803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}