{"id":77405,"date":"2019-10-24T04:31:42","date_gmt":"2019-10-24T10:31:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=77405"},"modified":"2019-10-24T06:38:17","modified_gmt":"2019-10-24T12:38:17","slug":"western-grebe-trying-to-walk-with-little-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/24\/western-grebe-trying-to-walk-with-little-success\/","title":{"rendered":"Western Grebe Trying To Walk With Little Success"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grebes of all species very rarely try to walk or even come out of the water onto a solid surface. Because of their unusual anatomy standing and walking are almost impossible tasks but this one made the attempt anyway. The results were hilarious.<\/p>\n

First a little background illustrated with a photo.<\/p>\n

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Yes, that’s actually a leg and foot sticking out of the rear end of this juvenile Western Grebe during a leg and wing stretch. Notice where the leg is attached to the body. In grebes the attachment is so far to the rear that walking is about like flying is for humans – we just don’t have the anatomy for it. On those very rare occasions when grebes do attempt to walk they have to try to stand with their bodies almost erect vertically which is extremely awkward and unnatural for them, to the point that the attempt is usually hilarious to watch.<\/p>\n

Compare this leg placement to that of a walking duck and you’ll see what I mean. Duck legs are attached beneath them rather than at the rear. Over the years I’ve spent many hundreds of hours watching and photographing Western Grebes, often large numbers of them at the same time, and only on three occasions have I seen one come onto land and try to walk.<\/p>\n

The sixteen photos below document one of those three attempts. They were taken several years ago at Bear River MBR. They’re only of documentary quality but I think they get the job done.<\/p>\n

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I didn’t know it at the time but apparently this grebe was eyeing a potential destination on the other side of the duckweed and on shore. Because of all the duckweed floating on the water and on top of the shore the actual shoreline is difficult to discern but it’s there somewhere under the duckweed that we see in this photo.<\/p>\n

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Suddenly “he” lifted out of the water and began to make the attempt to reach his destination somewhere on the shore. Here you can see that the water beneath his feet is only a few centimeters deep and the actual shoreline beneath the duckweed runs diagonally and is only about 2″ in front of his feet. There’s no water beneath the duckweed in front of him.<\/p>\n

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In this photo the tip of his left foot is right on the hidden shoreline. Now he’s actually beginning to walk (more like a slow run) on solid but wet ground beneath the duckweed.<\/p>\n

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He could barely stand as he tried to walk.<\/p>\n

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His body got too far in front of his feet so he had to…<\/p>\n

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hop forward in an attempt to get them beneath him again but…<\/p>\n

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it didn’t work very well.<\/p>\n

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So for a brief moment he tried to stand without walking but only with limited success.<\/p>\n

It didn’t take him long to decide that all this was a bad idea so he…<\/p>\n

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turned tail and began to skedaddle back to the security of the water.<\/p>\n

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But making the transition from fairly solid ground beneath the duckweed to the water wasn’t easy. He plopped down on the shoreline…<\/p>\n

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and appeared to try to push himself forward into the water (his feet are at or very near the shoreline beneath the duckweed) but apparently it was still too shallow and his body was dragging on the bottom so he…<\/p>\n

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just sat there for a moment and thought about what he would do next. Eventually he cheated and…<\/p>\n

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used his wings.<\/p>\n

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But even then it wasn’t easy and he had to…<\/p>\n

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struggle to get into water deep enough so that…<\/p>\n

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he could finally swim away and feel safe and secure again. He looks pretty pleased with himself doesn’t he.<\/p>\n

Poor bird. He must have felt like a stranded whale while he was on the shore.<\/p>\n

And I have to wonder what his original intention was that appealed to him so much that he even made the attempt. I’ll bet he didn’t try that again anytime soon.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note: By now subscribers to my blog already know that last night I had another brain fart and published this post prematurely when it was far from complete. It’s just too damned easy to click on the “Publish” button instead of the “Save Draft” button when I’m composing a post. So I had to disable the post which meant that the link in the email subscribers received didn’t work.<\/em><\/p>\n

Apologies. This is becoming an embarrassing habit…<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Grebes of all species very rarely try to walk or even come out of the water onto a solid surface. Because of their unusual anatomy standing and walking are almost impossible tasks but this one made the attempt anyway. The results were hilarious.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77380,"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":[338,5,334,395,366],"tags":[731,49,4788,4249,879,4787,322],"class_list":["post-77405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-miscellaneous","category-western-grebes","tag-aechmophorus-occidentalis","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-coming-onto-land","tag-duckweed","tag-leg-attachment","tag-trying-to-walk","tag-western-grebe"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/western-grebe-7173-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-k8t","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77405","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=77405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}