Month: June 2015

I was certainly disappointed when I didn’t see any avocet chicks at Bear River, but I saw a lot of other chicks like the Clark’s Grebe chicks I featured on my last blog entry. I also saw numerous Canada Goose Gosling of all ages

and sizes.

One of the biggest treats, though, was this sighting of a Curlew.

At first sighting I wondered what kind of birds all those small birds around the Curlew were. Then I realized they were actually very large Curlew chicks, the first I have ever seen.

The biggest sighting, though, was a day later hundreds of miles away when I spotted two swans with their cygnet. I’ll have to admit that one of my long-term birding goals is to see more of the birds I see wintering in Puget Sound in their breeding habitat. Bear River was a great place to start and one I’ll return to often in the future.

If you’re too late to watch the rehearsals and the courtship, it’s always fun to stick around and watch the Clark’s Grebes with their chicks. I was fascinated when I saw this mother (for the sake of this narrative I’m assuming that the first grebe was the mother and the second was the father) trying to herd two chicks. First she followed the one that went to the left,

but almost instantly changed her mind, following the one on the right, instead, as the two chicks got further apart.

The chick on the right swam toward the mother, apparently content to be close to her.

After catching up with that chick, the mother vocalized several times quite distinctly.

Unfortunately, I understand Horned Grebes but not Clark’s Grebes, so I’m not sure if she was calling to the other chick or to the other parent. I do know that the chick with her started vocalizing right afterwards.

It didn’t take long before the presumed dad was tending to the chick that had swam away from the mother.

Apparently satisfied that the problem had been solved, the mother and the other chick snuggled up to each other.

It’s hard not to anthromorphise birds we observe, but it seemed pretty clear that these parents were as concerned for their wandering young as any of us would be.

I kept waiting for all the Clark’s Grebes I saw to break out into a full-blown courtship dance, but it never happened. I suspect that almost everything I saw was a rehearsal, or perhaps a warm-up, for the real thing, a full-blown courtship.

This was the cutest sequence to me, though I’m assuming that they really weren’t courting here since there were four, not two, grebes. These three grebes seemed very concentrated on the approaching grebe.

Suddenly three of the grebes rose up in the water and took off faster than I could have imagined possible.

Almost as fast, two of the three stopped , while the third kept going, as seen by his wake going off-screen.

Eventually, even the third one stopped and the other three caught up with it,

and all four paddled off, just as if nothing had happened,

though the one that had gone the furthest suddenly started looking back

until all four disappeared behind the bushes.It certainly never looked like there was any real courtship going on here.

I recorded one other sequence where two grebes were preening and “necking.”

Curiously, all three sequences are part of the courtship shown in this famous BBC courtship sequence:

It’s electrifying watching the courtship on-screen, but it was equally thrilling watching the rehearsal in real life. Hopefully, I’ll live long enough to witness a full courtship live.