{"id":97748,"date":"2021-05-01T05:39:37","date_gmt":"2021-05-01T11:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=97748"},"modified":"2021-05-01T07:05:06","modified_gmt":"2021-05-01T13:05:06","slug":"eared-grebe-an-unusual-feeding-behavior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/05\/01\/eared-grebe-an-unusual-feeding-behavior\/","title":{"rendered":"Eared Grebe – An Unusual Feeding Behavior"},"content":{"rendered":"

And a Pied-billed Grebe with kleptoparasitic<\/a><\/span><\/span> tendencies.<\/p>\n

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In my day I’ve watched and photographed countless numbers of Eared Grebes feeding, often from a distance on the Great Salt Lake but sometimes from very close up on fresh water ponds. They’ve always been feeding on insects or tiny crustaceans and used one of two feeding techniques.<\/p>\n

One technique is to dive in order to search the bottom for food. If the water is very shallow their dive isn’t particularly energetic because they don’t have to get their buoyant body very far below the water’s surface. .<\/p>\n

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But when the water is a little deeper they’re required to jump higher off the surface and enter the water at a steeper angle in order to reach the substrate and search for food. When they dive for food around here they’re typically feeding on tiny insects or crustaceans on the muddy bottom when they’re on fresh water or they’re after brine shrimp near the sandy bottom the Great Salt Lake.<\/p>\n

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\"eared-grebes-8159\"<\/p>\n

Up to 5 million Eared Grebes use the Great Salt Lake as a staging area<\/a><\/span><\/span> during migration so at certain times of the year their numbers on the lake can be nothing short of mind-boggling. The grebes we see here, for as far as the eye can see, are resting on the surface between trips to the shallow bottom in search of the bountiful brine shrimp.<\/p>\n

They’re essentially refilling their fuel tanks so they can continue their long migration.<\/p>\n

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The second feeding technique I see is when the grebes dart across the water’s surface in pursuit of tiny floating insects, usually on fresh water but not always. This grebe is just about to gobble down a mosquito or possibly a midge it located on the surface of Farmington’s Glover Pond.<\/p>\n

When I’ve observed them feeding in the past, whether they’re on fresh water or the highly saline Great Salt Lake, Eared Grebes have always been feeding on insects or tiny crustaceans – never on fish.<\/p>\n

There aren’t any fish in the Great Salt Lake anyway, not at a salinity of about 13% in the south arm of the lake compared to 3.5% salt by weight in the typical ocean.<\/p>\n

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But I’ll be damned, three days ago when this Eared Grebe dove on a fresh water impoundment at Bear River MBR ‘he’ came up with a fish. First time I’ve ever seen that happen.<\/p>\n

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The small, pointedly sharp and very narrow bill of the Eared Grebe doesn’t seem to be designed for catching and eating fish so he…<\/p>\n

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really struggled to get it down. While he was struggling he knew he was vulnerable to attack from some other bird near the shore who might try to swipe the fish so he continued to swim slowly away from the shore as he tried to swallow his unusually large prey.<\/p>\n

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Sure enough, this Pied-billed Grebe approached him in a sneak attack and soon…<\/p>\n

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the chase was on. With the fish in his bill the Eared Grebe was at a defensive disadvantage so all he could do was skitter across the water and hope to…<\/p>\n

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outrun his attacker. The chase was a long one but in the end the Eared Grebe escaped with his fish but by then he was so far away I never did see if he was eventually able to swallow it. Personally I have my doubts, but who knows…<\/p>\n

When I arrived home I researched the diet of Eared Grebes and discovered that they actually are known to occasionally<\/em> eat small fish but this was a first time for me.<\/p>\n

Perhaps they do it more often in other areas where smaller fish are more often available. I dunno.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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And a Pied-billed Grebe with kleptoparasitic tendencies.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":97753,"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":[3,338,5,334,372,8,392,394,359],"tags":[49,728,107,1239,5730,117,160,1626,251,727,311],"class_list":["post-97748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-eared-grebes","category-ecology-and-environment","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-pied-billed-grebes","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-brine-shrimp","tag-diet","tag-diving","tag-do-eared-grebes-eat-fish","tag-eared-grebe","tag-great-salt-lake","tag-kleptoparasite","tag-pied-billed-grebe","tag-podiceps-nigricallis","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/eared-grebe-9995-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-pqA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97748","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=97748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}