How Grebes Build Floating Nests That Keep Their Eggs High and Dry
Dead and rotting aquatic plants are the Pied-billed Grebe's nesting materials of choice.
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Transcript:
This is BirdNote!
The call of this water bird, the Pied-billed Grebe, is unusual isn鈥檛 it! Their nests are unusual too 鈥 little platforms of plant material that float on water, hidden behind vegetation.
We鈥檙e with Martin Muller, an expert who loves unraveling the mysteries of Pied-billed Grebes:
鈥淲ell, there鈥檚 the nest鈥here it is! We didn鈥檛 even see it because we were standing on the wrong side of the cattails, so if we step back a little bit鈥ithout the bird seeing鈥s directly staring at it, it鈥檒l carry on.鈥
The birds are diving for decaying plant material, picking it up from the bottom of the lake, piling it up until it forms a floating mass.
鈥淣ow this will gradually sink so they keep adding on to it鈥 and when the first egg is laid, it can be laid in a puddle of water 鈥 it will be that flimsy a structure 鈥 and then what they do is they add on more plant material on the side of, the rim of, the nest and as they turn the eggs. They鈥檒l actually grab the plant material and tuck it underneath the eggs, and that way they raise the eggs out of the water until they鈥檙e high and dry after a couple of days.鈥
鈥淭hen one of the fascinating things is the dead and decaying plant material actually gives off heat, that helps some of the incubation of the eggs鈥ot completely, but it helps a little bit鈥︹
You can learn more and see photos of a nest and of newly hatched Pied-billed Grebes, at .
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Credits:
Featuring Martin Muller
Interview by John Kessler
Story by Chris Peterson
Narrator: Michael Stein
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Call of Pied-billed Grebe [105421] recorded by G.A. Keller.
BirdNote's theme music was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
漏 2013 Tune In to Nature.org May 2017