Bird of the Month: Pied-billed Grebe
Pied-billed Grebe. Photo by Jeff Bryant.
By Roger Digges, CCAS Vice-President
You see a bird moving slowly across a body of water, and you wonder, what is that? It’s too small to be a duck, you think, until some smart aleck points out that it’s the same size as a Green-winged Teal, our smallest duck. Okay, you might respond, but it doesn’t have a wide, flat duck bill. It has a short, thick bill—wait a minute. Where did it go? Then a minute later it pops up again, a few feet or maybe as far as 15 or 20 feet away from where it disappeared. What is it?
Pied-billed Grebes are waterbirds, which the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds calls “part bird, part submarine.” Like many birds such as other grebes, loons, and “diving ducks” like mergansers, canvasbacks, and scaup, a Pied-billed Grebe’s feet are near the back of its body to propel itself into a dive when it needs to. This bird can also trap water in its feathers, allowing it to adjust its buoyancy like, well, a submarine. The grebes can stay deep underwater, just below the surface, or above the surface as much as it needs to, from just its head to most of its body.
You are most likely to find these common birds on relatively small bodies of water near places where there are ample water plants. I’ve found them at Weaver and Crystal Lake Parks in Urbana; Kaufman Lake in Champaign; Homer Lake, River Bend, and Middle Fork Forest Preserves; and many other places. October is a good time to find them as they are en route to their winter residences. Look for them along the edges of a body of water; a small, brown, almost tailless bird. During breeding season, they have an ivory bill with a black vertical line on it. Now that the breeding season is over, their bill has changed color to a yellowish brown with, at most, a hint of that black vertical line.
Unless you own a pond with thick vegetation, a pond that has crustaceans (think crayfish), small fish, or other aquatic animals from insect larvae to frogs and mussels, you won’t be able to attract Pied-billed Grebes to your property. Instead, you can enjoy an outing to one of the many wetlands in our area.
In addition to eating, these birds, like all life forms, engage in making copies of themselves. Unlike last month’s bird, the Blue Jay, which mates for life, Pied-billed Grebes are “serially monogamous,” that is, they mate only for one season. Once they have mated, male and female build a nest on a platform of floating vegetation. In the 4-to-5-inch diameter nest bowl, the female deposits 2 to 10 eggs. The pair takes turns incubating the eggs over the next 23 to 27 days. Unlike the helpless “altricial” nestlings of perching birds such as robins, cardinals, and bluebirds, Pied-billed Grebe youngsters are “precocial,” and can leave the nest within a day of hatching. They can’t swim yet, so they climb on a parent’s back, ride on them, and are fed by them for a week or more. How does the parent manage to dive for food or in case of threat with chicks on their back? They tuck them under their wings.
Once the youngsters are able to swim, catch food on their own, and fly, and before lakes and ponds freeze, Pied-billed Grebes in the northern part of North America, including Champaign County, begin to migrate. The number of these birds during fall migration peaks here in late October, although pied-billeds can still be found in numbers until freeze-up in December. In a mild winter, they may not leave at all. They will begin arriving again during spring migration as late February.
How are Pied-billed Grebes doing? Surprisingly well for birds that depend on wetlands for their survival. According to the North American Breeding Bird Survey, their numbers are stable. There continue to be more than 3 million of them breeding in the Western Hemisphere, from the Arctic Circle to southernmost Argentina. However, to ensure their population’s stability, we need to continue to protect wetlands.
Pied-billed Grebe. Photo by Jeff Bryant.