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Amazing Pied-billed Grebe Transcript-626
BirdNote®
The Amazing Sinking Pied-billed Grebe
Written by Bob Sundstrom
This is BirdNote!
Does this song evoke an old jungle movie?
[Pied-billed Grebe song]
Well, actually we’re hearing the Pied-billed Grebe, a common resident bird of our freshwater lakes and ponds. In addition to its stentorian voice, the small, nondescript Pied-billed Grebe has an even more astonishing talent.
[Pied-billed Grebe song]
Picture a Pied-billed Grebe, dressed in brown, about a foot long, with a wedge-shaped bill, floating like a cork among the lily pads. Suddenly the grebe begins to sink, inch by inch, straight downward like a submarine – and disappears! Thirty seconds later it reappears, just its head above the water, peering left and right.
When ducks dive, they must leap forward and stroke powerfully with their feet to overcome their inherent buoyancy and go under water. The grebe, however, is the master of its own buoyancy. It can squeeze out both the air trapped in its feathers and in its internal air-sacs, sinking effortlessly. Grebes also swim under water more easily than ducks, which must work hard to keep from popping back up to the surface.
[Pied-billed Grebe song]
Who knows? Perhaps it is this special talent that the amazing sinking Pied-billed Grebe is singing about.
To see a photo of this bird and all we feature on the show, come to our website, BirdNote.org. I’m Frank Corrado.
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Call of the Pied-bill Grebe provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Recorded by G.A. Keller. Ambient from G. F. Budney.
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© Seattle Audubon 03/20/06 © 2009 Tune In to Nature.org Rev. for March 2009
ID#032006PBGRKPLU
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