Grebe.jpg
There is much to admire about the pied-billed grebe, including the way it submerges, easily and often.
Lake Onota in Pittsfield is one of five large bodies of water in the upper Housatonic Valley of Berkshire County. These lakes and ponds are especially attractive to migrating water birds in the fall, and are always worth the half hour of travel from the Connecticut Valley.
On our second trip there this fall, we found the rusty blackbirds that I wrote about last week. We also studied all three of the grebes normally found in the Northeast, the red-necked, the horned, and the pied-billed grebe.
Two of these grebes nest in the prairies of the northwest from Montana to Alaska. The third one, the pied-billed grebe, nests in the Great Prairies of the U.S. and Canada, but also eastward to New England, where it breeds very rarely in wooded swamps.
Years ago a friend brought me to a beaver swamp in Westhampton where a pair of pied-billed grebes was raising a family. It is the only time I have heard their amazing mating call, a hoarse, throaty, trembling “gawaaaaaa.”
The pied-billed grebe is a small secretive bird in the fall, keeping a low profile with head down when swimming on the surface, but spending long periods underwater, often in the shallows near shore. At Onota we had to watch closely to spot them near the far shore.
Pied-billed grebes spend the winter throughout the southern U. S. in shallow inland and near-coast waters that do not freeze completely. Occasionally we will be surprised by one lurking in an unfrozen pond or stream when we go to the coast in January.
The horned grebes we saw on Lake Onota that day were easier to spot, swimming a bit closer to us and holding their white heads high. Not far away was a single red-necked grebe, larger and darker with a longer, pointed, but sturdy bill. You can find the horned grebe easily all winter in coastal waters, but the red-necked grebe is common there only on migration in early spring and late fall.
There are three other grebes that are resident in western North America. Two of them are larger than the red-necked grebe and look very much alike, both with long, thin white necks. They are the western grebe, which has a mostly white cheek, and the Clark’s grebe, whose cheek is completely white.
An occasional western grebe appears on our New England coast, and I have seen one only a couple of times in 50 years. The Clark’s Grebe is less common in the west and virtually never seen in the east.
The third grebe that is found in the west is called the eared grebe, a bird the same size and shape as the horned grebe, with only a very small difference in its neck color, and in the shape of its bill and crown. It breeds in the western mountains of the U.S. and winters on the Pacific Coast, as well as the mountains of Mexico.
The origin of the family name “grebe” is not known, but it somehow fits these sleek water birds with delicate necks and lobed feet. The species names all refer to distinctive markings on their heads, which are only present in the breeding plumage, seen here sometimes in early spring.
We had hardly returned from our tour of the Berkshire Lakes when word came of an eared grebe found on Lake Quaboag in the town of Brookfield. It persisted for a couple of weeks, the time it took me to be lured into traveling there in search of it.
The lake was familiar to me, for a few of us had kayaked the large marsh west of the lake for several years in the summer. This time I came to the parking lot and boat launch on the north side of the lake itself. I found myself buffeted there by strong winds that roiled the lake’s surface.
I met another birder who had come from much farther away, and lacked a field scope. He was really grateful when I showed him the eared grebe swimming and diving among the swells at quite a distance.
From the Berkshires to the Brookfields, it has been a good month for those who admire grebes.
Seth Kellogg can be reached at skhawk@comcast.net
The Allen Bird Club website can be found at massbird.org/allen