Tag: chicks

Western Grebe – Dumping The Chick Load

At this age Western Grebe chicks are heavy-bodied, small headed, loud, awkward and demanding. They alternately ride on the back of each parent (back brooding) as the other adult rests or hunts for fish to feed to its family. At this stage the youngsters are good swimmers and there’s often not enough room on the parents back for all of the chicks to ride comfortably anyway so the parent uses an interesting strategy to “dump its load” into the water when it needs a break.

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Ferruginous Hawk Chicks – Twelve Days Later

We arrived home from our latest foray into western Montana yesterday afternoon – earlier than planned due to uncooperative weather and (to some extent) birds.  Those issues are just part of the game when you’re a bird photographer but I’m sure we’ll try again several more times this summer and early fall.  We still had a great time, saw some wonderful new and wild country, reacquainted with an old friend (and met a new one who now lives in Alaska but graduated from the same Salt Lake City High School where I was a teacher for 18 years – small world!) and reveled as we always do in our time spent in Big Sky Country.   And I did get a few shots that I like that I’ll be posting soon. This post is for documentary purposes only  – no aesthetics involved. In a completely unplanned manner (long story) we ended up spending a few minutes at the Ferruginous Hawk nest that I posted about here from our last Montana trip.  I thought some of you might like to see how the chicks are coming along.   This is one of the images from that earlier post – taken on June 6, 2013.     Here are the same birds 12 days later, June 18, 2003.  As you can see, the kids are growing up – and quickly! We had no choice but to be there at mid-day so the birds are side lit by very harsh light but I still think the comparison between the two images gives the viewer a good idea of how much development occurs in…

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Ferruginous Hawk With Chicks

At the end of one of those very long, rough and dusty drives we came upon this Ferruginous Hawk on a nest. We’d spotted the nest on a previous day but could only see the top of the bird’s head as it hunkered down so at the time we didn’t know what species the occupant was.

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Clark’s Grebes – Parents Feeding Fish To Some Very Excited Chicks

This past June I spent lots of time with Western and Clark’s Grebes as they were raising their families.   The two species are quite similar but the adult  birds in this post can be recognized as Clark’s Grebes by their bright yellow-orange bills and the fact that their eyes are surrounded by white plumage, rather than black.    1/2000. f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light This female of a mated pair was fishing for her family as the male back-brooded two chicks (the sexes take turns with each role).  I happened to catch her just as she emerged from the water with a fish and shook the water off.  I wish I had better eye contact and more room around the grebe, but this image is full frame.  I include it here because it’s the logical beginning of this “fish story”.      1/2000. f/8, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light Seconds later she swam over to deliver the fish to her family.  Sometimes the fish will be given to the brooding parent, who may eat it or give it to a chick. Other times, the fishing parent gives it directly to one of the youngsters.  Either way, if the chicks are hungry they become very excited and aggressive in their attempts to be the one who gets the fish.  Before the young birds saw breakfast coming their way, they were tucked down peacefully under each wing with only their heads and necks sticking out.  All that changed in an instant.       1/2000….

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Western Grebes Dumping Their Chicks

I haven’t posted for a few days because I’ve been in Montana for most of the past week.  I have many images from that trip and hopefully some of them will appear here in the near future. But for now I’d like to report on another grebe behavior I photographed recently.  This time it will be the Western Grebe, rather than the Clark’s Grebes in two of my recent posts.  The two species are very similar and most easily distinguished by differences in bill color (Clark’s is bright yellow to orange-yellow while the Western’s bill is yellow to dull olive colored) and coloration around the eye (Clark’s is white surrounding the eye while the Western is dark around the eye). Both species rarely fly except during migration.  In fact for much of the year they are incapable of flight because their flight muscles atrophy soon after arriving at their  breeding grounds.  So it’s my working theory that this might explain part of the reason why these grebes do so much wing flapping and stretching while sitting on the surface of the water – to excercise their relatively unused wings. Note:  In many of these images I was too close to the birds to get an aesthetically pleasing composition so in most cases the birds will be too tight in the frame.  But I think they show well the behavior I’m describing.    1/2000, f/10, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc This Western Grebe is in the middle of a wing-flap.  They look so lithe and streamlined while…

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