Rondeau Ric

We went to the hawk watch at Holiday Beach in southern Ontario on the weekend. There weren't a lot of birds passing through but we did find four pied-billed grebes in the marsh which is adjacent to the tower. Podilymbus podiceps   These are brown birds, slightly darker above and more tawny-brown on the underparts. During spring and summer, the crown and nape are dark and the throat is black. While breeding, the bill is whitish with a black band (“pied’), but otherwise is yellow-brown. Juveniles have striped faces. Like other grebes, the Pied-billed Grebe eats large quantities of its own feathers. Feathers may at times fill up more than half of a grebe’s stomach, and they are sometimes fed to newly hatched chicks. The ingested plumage appears to form a sieve-like plug that prevents hard, potentially harmful prey parts from passing into the intestine, and it helps form indigestible items into pellets which they can regurgitate. The longest-lived Pied-billed Grebe on reco...