~ By Vicky ~
On our woodland birdwatching outings, we often spotted small nests woven into the branches of spindly trees, but the nests were empty, dry, and no longer used. Still, S and I marveled at these finds. We wondered which type of bird built it, when did they use it, and will they nest there again. This in turn got us wondering about the nesting behaviors of birds. An empty nest inspired hope that, with luck, we shall someday stumble upon a nest full of eggs in the field.
Since a great deal of our birding knowledge comes from direct observation reinforced by our birding guides, we know very little about nesting behaviors simply because we have very little real life experience observing this cycle of the bird's life. The active nests we have encountered were limited to large birds such as Osprey and Bald-Eagles with their very large conspicuous nests. We have had luck with flat pine nests of Great-horned Owls, mud nest of swallows, and rookeries of herons. Our neighbor has robins who annually build their cup nest on an outdoor flood-light beneath an eave of their house. Another lucky neighbor has had Bushtits build their dirty sock nest in a low branch of her cedar tree. We are sure we have had many nesting birds in our very backyard because we regularly see juvenile Lesser Finches, Chickadees, and House Sparrows harassing their parents to be mouth-fed at our bird feeders; their nests, however, remained ever elusive. The luckiest nest find was an American Dipper couple, but they were still in the courtship phase of building their moss-on-boulder nest.
As with everything involving wildlife, much luck is needed for a successful outing. But what about skill? Dare S. and I try to invoke skill in finding egg-laden nests? For the summer of 2023, this was our challenge: Two amateur bird watchers will rely on Will and Skill to move beyond the boundaries of Luck to make the egg-nest find.
The Skill to Find. The skill to find utilizes experience to increase our chances of the find. When, where, and which bird have we noticed with young? Can we make a decent educated guess on where the nest will be placed should we endeavor to look for it?
The Will to Find. The will to find encompasses the physical and mental energy needed for this endeavor, and it also encompasses time. We needed to increase our chances of the find by maximizing the limited time we had each day for the quiet hunt. The local wildlife refuge was near enough that we could get there and back at the end of a work day and still have about two hours for the quiet stakeout.
Early this spring, S and I scanned several wildlife refuges for any sign of wood-duck nests - a hole in a tree above or very near to water. We dreamed of seeing the newly hatched chicks jumping from their tree-holed nest. A few potential nesting sites caught our eye; leaning trees with a cavity above still water. But to see the mighty jump of the wood duck chicks on their first day of life required more luck and impeccable timing than we could possible have. First, we would need to be certain of an active nest. Second, we would need to check in on it daily or at least have a good estimate of the hatching date. And third, we would have to be there at the exact hours of their hatching. We settled on simply enjoying sightings of a mother wood-duck swimming around with her young brood.
Our ambitious thoughts then turned to past observations of the cute fiery-headed juveniles of Coots and the clown-faced juveniles of Pied-billed Grebes seen in a certain pond at a certain Wildlife Refuge during a certain time of year. And so it was decided that the Pied-billed Grebe and the American Coot would be our nest-stakeout goals. In late May, we prioritized nest-searching at a lake where the trail only skirted one edge of the lake, leaving the majority of the lakeside undisturbed by people.
As is our modus operandi, we would arrive at the lake by sunrise to get the best light, beat the heat, and stay low of people. On our initial walk we spotted two nests being built by Pied-billed Grebes in a particular back area of the lake that funnels into a narrow waterway. Here, the water's edge is full of tall bulrushes and areas of still water. But most of this part of the lakeside was covered in impenetrable blackberry bramble going as deep as twenty feet, and as high as ten feet, making it impossible to see, let alone get to, the actual water. There were only three grass-way traces used by elk and other wildlife that allowed us to get to the water's edge. Of these three sites, two made potential stakeout spots in which to sit and observe.
On an evening outing of May 26, we discovered an egg-filled nest perfectly situated in a dense bed of short bulrushes several yards into the lake. The nest was woven into several stalks of water grass, and was thus a part of the waterscape, undulating with the motion of the water. The off-white eggs floating on a scrape of brown nesting material seemed precarious to our solid earth human sensibilities. The early evening light surpassed the morning light because the nest site was front-lit with nice saturated colors and depth, and the cooler temperature created much less atmospheric distortion, giving crisper views through our optics. The reeds at the water edge were high enough to cover us, but gave us lousy obscured views. We did not risk moving beyond the cover of the reeds and disturb the grebes with our human nearness. Thus, we stayed two-hundred feet back on a hillside vantage of the hayfield using Lunette the Wonder-Scope. Over the next several weeks, we would walk the three-quarter mile long path to the same vantage spot and check in on the nest.
This nest, belonging to the Peeker family, so named because the nest peeked out of the bulrushes and was easily lost to view, thrilled us to no end. At our loud arrival setting up our scoping station, the mother would hurriedly cover her precious brood with twigs and slip off the nest. We would stand still taking turns looking through the scope. At times her head would peek out of the water near her nest. The nest is so cleverly created that the grebe can easily slip back and forth from water to nest. More often than not we'd be looking at an empty nest, turn our gaze away for a short moment, and suddenly find the mother back on her nest warming her precious brood. For the first half of June, we went about our rote days, but our thoughts were always going back to the nest - eager to see it again, but fearful of missing the hatch. Fear of missing the hatch compelled us to visit the nest about three to four times a week in the evenings.
June 19. It was the usual walk down the our well-trodden scrape of a path through ankle-grabbing blackberry vines and past the hayfield to our nest-obsession. As usual, I saw the mother dive off her nest at our approach, and as we set up our scope, I could see she was nearby in the water. Then S, looking through the scope, gave a hushed cry of delight, directing my gaze towards the orange and white striped clown-faces of two baby grebes on their mother's back. The mother and the father and the two frantic fledglings were escaping into a dense part of the watergrasses, and so the view of the two chicks was fleeting. The family stayed hidden there for the entire time that we waited. Since we had just been there four days ago, we estimated that the two chicks were a day or two old.
Three days later we returned, and this time to all five hatched chicks. Three chicks were already swimming by their parents side, and on the mother's back (or father's back since both parents raise the brood) were two chicks. The mother kept her wings slightly raised to give a warm place for the her precious passengers, and it gave me the distinct impression of a pleasure boat with the precocious passengers basking and being fawned on by the other eager parent who brought tasty morsels ship-side and into their little orange mouths.
How the siblings arranged the ride-share is a mystery. Does the older shove off the younger when he tires of swimming and wants his turn? Or is he too full of bravado at his newly achieved swimming prowess to be bothered with an easy ride. Differing birding guides will say that the baby grebes will ride on the mother's back for the first week, or for up to four weeks. Our experience had us seeing the fledglings riding the parent's back for the first week. But we only spent about an hour and a half with them several times a day in the early evenings, so, alas, we most likely missed a lot of this families routines and bonding experiences.
Due to the distance we kept at to prevent disturbing the grebe family, I couldn't use my 200-500mm lens as it was inadequate to cover the distance. Instead, I used the digiscope to get the two photos above. I was pleasantly surprised when my 800mm lens, which had been on backorder for the past six months, finally shipped and arrived in late June.
By this time, a little over a week had past, and the chicks were always seen swimming in close group. They would stay afloat of the water waiting for a parent to emerge from a dive to bring them food. We never saw them going back to the nest. Rather, they stayed within a yard or two of the nest in the calm waters of the shorter bulrush beds. We worried about how exposed to predators the chicks seemed, but we noticed that the percularly red-orange on their bills and faces was the perfect camouflage against the orange-stalked reeds that flecked the bulrush beds. So perfect was their camouflage that once chick had no scruples in testing fate by bathing right then and there.
Despite S and my outdoorsiness and birdstalking ways, we have not a piece of camouflaged gear amongst ourselves. We generally leave it to luck to get us close to birds. Our aversion to camouflage is also rooted in our aversion to gunner culture. But with these almost two months of staking out the grebe family at a distance, I decided it was time to get over the culture conflict and up our stakeout game. I bought S and I two Lenscoat wearable hides in RealMax 5 camo. Lenscoat is marketed for the photographer and not the gunner, so this was an acceptable compromise. The hides have a mesh face to look out from, but otherwise covers us from head-to-toe. They are specifically made for the photo-dork with her telephoto lens on tripod set-up. And so, with our packable tripod stools and camo hides, we were set to stakeout pondside amongst the taller bulrushes.
The hides were brilliant! We would put them on behind the bulrush wall out of sight of the waterfowl and slowly creep up pondside. Even the skittish Blue-winged Teals didn't flinch by our nearness. We had the best front-row seats in the house to watch our grebe family. We even discovered two other nests. One in stiff watergrasses and elevated rather high, so we named it the Penthouse nest.
The other nest was a bit deeper in the watergrasses of the opposite bank. On this nest, the mother never left. We named this the Good Mother nest due to her unshakable determination to stay on her brood.
Our pond-side, camo-hided vantage point gave us the best views in which to watch the Peeker family's evening activities. Activities included: napping chicks, bathing chicks, bathing adults, adults feeding the chicks. At several weeks out, the chicks were diving and getting their own food. The older chicks seemed to have more stamina in their own food foraging, while the younger chicks preferred to wait around for mom or dad to bring up their meal.
The summer of 2023 watching the Peeker family grow up was a sublime experience. We were hopeful to be there to watch the Penthouse family and the Good Mother family grow up too. But on an outing in mid July, we noticed that the Penthouse nest looked flattened, and the Good Mother was no longer on her nest. We came back a couple of more times in case we had been mistaken, but each time we found the nests more dispersed and unrecognizable until we could no longer find a trace of them.
There were a few adult Grebes in the area, and we had to guess that the nests and eggs fell victim to a hungry coyote, of which we had seen glowering at the pond side. We surmised that as the water level fell with the ongoing summer, their nesting spots got nearer and nearer to the shore, or the water level became shallower to allow for easy pilfering by a land predator. We had heard young coyotes in the area howling, and sadly assumed nature had taken its course - hungry mama coyote doing what she needs to do to feed her own family, at the expense of our beloved Grebe families' eggs.
We don't know if grebes come back to mate where they were born, or if the Peeker parents will lay another brood in the same nest or area. But we must be hopeful that next summer we shall see a family of grebes in the same spot. And perhaps, the new parents will be the Grebes that grew up with us one fine summer. With our perfectly unobtrusive camo hides, pond side stakeout site, telephoto lens, and better knowledge of their nesting cycle, we shall be ready for them.
