I was tempted to call this, á la BuzzFeed, “You won’t believe these bird photographs!”, but refrained. They’re pictures of pied-billed grebes taken by Pete Moulton of Arizona, who wanted me to add that he’d be glad to answer readers’ questions in the comments.
I wanted to emphasize Pete’s offer because nearly everyone who sends me pictures looks at them when I post them, and also reads the comments. I also inform contributors when their photos are posted, which makes their participation easier. So always feel free to query the photographer!
Pete sent some great photos of adults and (adorable) chicks of the Pied-billed Grebe, Podilymbus podiceps, a bird widely distributed through the Americas (see range map below).
Pete’s notes:
Here are a few of my shots of this year’s Pied-billed Grebe Podilymbus podiceps nesting season on my home patch at Papago Park in Phoenix. Birds in urban areas are under enough pressure as it is, but they’re especially vulnerable during their breeding season, so some of these images were made at considerable distances and then heavily cropped.First, one of the nesting adults resting and casually preening on the day the eggs began to hatch (4 July). I included this one to show a foot, because grebes have interesting feet. Their toes aren’t webbed, as you might expect in birds which spend nearly all their time on the water, but rather have large, leathery lobes along the sides which serve the same purpose as webs.
JAC: Here’s a photo of the weird foot taken from BenWeb 3.2:
The youngsters began to appear later that day, after I’d left, but I made a point of visiting the next day. Sad to say, I had another responsibility earlier, and didn’t arrive until late enough that the sun was fairly high, and the light rather harsh. The chicks are precocial, hatching with a coat of down and capable of swimming within minutes of hatching. This pair of adults hatched four young, of which this is one.
The youngsters are constantly hungry, and this chick is calling for a parent to please bring some breakfast.
The parents are most attentive, and here comes one now with a choice morsel. The food is a crayfish, not native to Arizona, but much relished by both birds and fish. My understanding is that these ponds were once part of Arizona’s fisheries system, and that the crayfish were intentionally introduced as food for the gamefish. Now the ponds are part of the Phoenix urban fishing program, and the crayfish are still present in high numbers.
The adults typically remove the claws and most of the crayfish’s legs before handing the tail to one of the chicks.
By now, the youngsters have fledged. They have their first coat of contour feathers, and all the flight feathers are fully grown. They’re diving and foraging independently, though they still associate with the adults on occasion. It won’t be long before the adults drive them away to take up their own lives on other ponds. They’ll undergo a preformative molt in the next few weeks, and the head striping will disappear, to be replaced with plumage indistinguishable from the basic-plumage adults.
The range map from the Cornell site:
What unique markings on the fledglings!
Gorgeous birds!
I’m actually rather interested in how the crayfish fit into the ecosystem. Are they considered invasive? Has the addition of a nutritious new food source provided any measurable boons to the native species?
Darren, I know for sure that both the Pied-billed Grebe and Green Heron have increased in number since urbanization of the Phoenix metro area, but it’s difficult to judge how much of the increase has resulted simply from the creation of wetland habitats that weren’t here previously, and how much is directly attributable to the introduction of crayfish.
Nice work Pete, thanks. We get those on our pond here in MN too.
Very cool. I am now sure I have seen these birds in Iowa, but I did not know what they were.
I wonder if the bold color marking on the chicks are a kind of ‘razzle dazzle’ camouflage like was used on old battleships.
I don’t know the origin of the striped heads, but they’re being selected for. The brighter and more striking a youngster is, the more food it gets from the parents.
Readers may be interested to know that there used to be a “giant” form of the pied-billed grebe that occurred on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. It was thought to be flightless (although I don’t think that this was ever proven, they simply were never seen flying). It was considered a distinct species: Podilymbas gigas, Atitlan grebe, although I don’t know whether DNA analysis was ever done on it. Its population was always tiny. It was like an island endemic, except the island was a lake. The species went extinct in the 80s because of a number of factors, one of which was apparently interbreeding with “normal” pied-billed grebes. So maybe it was not a valid species after all.
My mental image was of a giant bird, causing me to wonder how they may have mated. But the giant grebe was 40-50 cm, and so I guess is was possible they could mate.
Probably the major cause of extinction of the Atitlan Grebe was introduction of Largemouth Bass for fishing tourists. It greatly reduced the numbers of small fish which both local residents and the grebes depended on for food. Loss of reeds (nesting habitat) also contributed to the decline.
Nice photos and that sure is a weird foot!
Great photos! I always love the markings on the chicks, so unusual.
Beautiful birds, and gorgeous photos.
Those are some great pictures. I especially like the first one of the adult scratching with his lobed foot.
Lobed feet have been invented four times independently (that we know of): by grebes, phalaropes, coots, and finfoots (finfeet?). The last two are not too distantly related, but distantly enough that we know they were independent events. I don’t think anyone knows why, if indeed there’s a reason. There’s another entry for the unanswered questions thread.
Lovely photos. I especially like the adult observing the chick with the crayfish.
Although mobile from hatching, chicks stay on the nest most of the time if they can. They brood on the parent’s back, not underneath them like chickens. The grebe belly is very densely feathered with only a narrow featherless strip. However, there is a big featherless area under the base of the wings and the chick slip in there. Very cute.
(I did my master’s thesis on wing-shuffling as a thermoregulatory mechanism in these grebes. They’re so odd!)
In fact, I was hoping to get some shots of chicks riding the adults’ backs, but it wasn’t to be this year.
Wonderful photos.
I don’t think I’ve seen grebes in the wild, surprising since their habitat is so wide spread.
Interesting tidbit that the parents ‘clean’ the crawfish and only feed the tail. Is this a unique behavior in birds- selecting the best morsels? And if the crawfish were introduced, it seems they learned this behavior rather quickly.
They are pretty small birds and not brightly colored. It would be very easy to miss them or, if you didn’t look closely, just think they were coots (very similar in size, shape, etc.).
This is one of my all time favorite birds. I watched them closely many years ago. Dive………….surface…dive……….surface.
I had to look it up to be sure, but pied refers to having more than one colour. The pied piper had multi-coloured clothes. Interesting that it doesn’t get used in every case. For example cats with multi-coloured noses don’t get labeled with pied-nose.
The toenail that first grebe is using to scratch its head has a flattened toenail that is finely divided and somewhat comb-like at the tip, a good tool for grooming.
Thank you all, both for the nice compliments, and also the opportunity to learn from you. This evening I know more about these little favorites than I did this morning, and that’s no bad thing.