{"id":79686,"date":"2019-12-21T05:22:51","date_gmt":"2019-12-21T12:22:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=79686"},"modified":"2019-12-21T06:15:39","modified_gmt":"2019-12-21T13:15:39","slug":"the-pied-billed-grebe-and-the-crayfish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/21\/the-pied-billed-grebe-and-the-crayfish\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pied-billed Grebe And The Crayfish"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever wondered how a small grebe swallows a crayfish with all those annoying legs and pincers sticking out? The answer is… it doesn’t. It amputates them first.<\/p>\n

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1\/1250, 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

Two days ago at one of several local ponds I frequent I spent time with this Pied-billed Grebe as it worked at swallowing a crayfish. “Crawdads” have many relatively large appendages that would seriously hinder the swallowing process so the grebe removes them before the crayfish goes down the hatch.<\/p>\n

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1\/1250, 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

I cropped tightly on this next photo so we can see the appendages better. Crayfish have five pairs of walking legs with the front pair having a large pincer at the terminal end. The grebe amputates them by grasping a leg in its bill and violently shaking the crayfish which usually amputates the leg at one of its joints. When that happens the crayfish often goes flying through the air.<\/p>\n

Here we can’t see the two large anterior pincers because one of them has already been removed (we can see it’s stump) and the other one is behind the grebe’s bill. A split second after this shot was taken the grebe shook the crayfish violently and amputated the pincer.<\/p>\n

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1\/1250, 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

A few seconds later both pincers and most of the other walking legs were gone. I haven’t included any of those removal photos because the grebe mostly turned its back to me during the process. At this point the grebe only had two or three more legs to remove before it swallowed the crayfish.<\/p>\n

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1\/1000, 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 it went down the hatch. Here we can see the stumps of all five walking legs on the right side of the crayfish.<\/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

This older photo of a different grebe shows the moment of amputation of one of the large pincers. The grebe held the anterior walking leg in its bill, shook violently, and the rest of the crayfish went flying through the air as the pincer remained in the grebe’s mouth. Amputation accomplished.<\/p>\n

In my experience Pied-billed Grebes always remove the two large pincers and all or most of the smaller walking legs before they swallow the crayfish. The reason they do it so reliably should be obvious.<\/p>\n

Photographing the process is great fun for the photographer with quick reflexes and a camera with a fast burst rate but each amputation happens very quickly so you have to pay attention and really be on your toes.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note:<\/em><\/p>\n

Amputating that many walking legs takes some time and they usually do it while on the surface so marauding gulls or other birds with kleptoparasitic tendencies often try to steal the crayfish. That’s an interaction that’s very challenging for the photographer to get photos of but I always try to be ready for it if it happens.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Have you ever wondered how a grebe swallows a crayfish with all those annoying legs and pincers sticking out? The answer is… it doesn’t. It amputates them first.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79691,"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":[4878,3729,2019,4877,251,993,256,4876],"class_list":["post-79686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-pied-billed-grebes","tag-amputation","tag-crawdad","tag-crayfish","tag-eating-a-crayfish","tag-pied-billed-grebe","tag-podilymbus-podiceps","tag-prey","tag-removing-legs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/pied-billed-grebe-2809-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-kJg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79686","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=79686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}