The Surprise Grebe Prize: A Nesting Haven
- birdingunfettered2
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
~ By Vicky & Sumalee
When I told a colleague about a contract job I was considering in Clear Lake, CA., she--like almost every Californian we spoke to--had a preternatural bias against Clear Lake. Upon hearing our plans, she paused and dropped her voice in concern: "have you been there yet?" That next weekend, S. and I reconnaissanced the lake and the RV parks nearby. I had also looked up a long-term stay RV park at Blue Lakes, so we also scouted it out. The Blue Lakes RV park had promise as a home base. And more importantly, Clear Lake had birds. The edges along the north side of the lake had tules rife with grebes.
We decided to take the gig, but people's reactions with our decision got so predictable that I had my rebuttals at the ready: "It teems with biodiversity!"; "sure, it's not a pristine alpine lake the likes of Waldo or Crater lake, but those lakes are so pristine that they don't support much aquatic life"; "algae is natural! The seasonal poisonous algae blooms also happen at Detroit Lake, which is the reservoir that provides all of Salem, OR's drinking water," etc. etc. (Nota bene: Crater and Waldo Lakes are nutrient-poor ultra-clear oligotrophic lakes; Clear Lake is a naturally-occurring "biologically productive" eutrophic lake; see Habitats of North America by Chaon and Campbell.)
Thankfully, our reputation as outdoors-women and birders gave people reason for pause. I like to think that my responses opened their eyes to the possibility that nature is messy, dirty, sometimes stinky, and not exclusively the playgrounds for humans. A murky lake with duckweed, algae, tules, and messy shorelines is a habitat. I know one concern others were hinting at was the reputation of a drug problem around Clear Lake, and that was valid, but I would brook no complaints about the quality of the lake itself.
Indeed, Clear Lake turned out to be a habitat that exceeded our expectations. We moved into the area in early September.
Our first days there, we spotted birds left, right, and center. Perky warblers and tanagers were migrating through; phoebes, California towhees, and a very vocal wrentit made themselves known. One evening, I had us check out a very birdy area on the North side of the lake that I remembered from our reconnaissance trip. The shoreline was obscured with trees, and as I walked along it to find a possible path in, I heard familiar bird sounds. We ended up walking along the gravel boat launch and spotted several grebes, their eyes bright ruby-red. They all looked especially elegant, and some pairs looked to be doing the mating match-up ritual, with one offering the other a piece of vegetation, and other pairs turning their heads simultaneously. Dare we believe to have had the luck to have stumbled upon them in mid-mating season?
Bird cries came back to my awareness, and we went back along the road until I found an opening in the trees. To our wonderment, there were dozens upon dozens of Clark's and Western Grebes on nests, building nests, diving, swimming, or bonding with each other. We had the profound dumb-luck to have stumbled upon a prolific grebe nesting site. S. pointed out a sign that confirmed the significance of this habitat for breeding grebes.
We scanned the site and saw nary a juvenile grebe or chick, which meant that, in the days to come, we would be treated to the hatching of several dozens of grebe babies. At this revelation, S. and I looked at each other with the same idea writ large in our thoughts: Grebe baby stakeout! I made note of the evening lighting, which front lit the nesting grounds with warm western light. This would do perfectly.
The next morning we returned to scout the shoreline for a good stakeout site. I didn't bring our camouflage blinds (this would be remedied once we returned to where we stored our possessions in Sacramento), so we had to rely on keeping a low profile behind the high tules and thick trees. We returned to the small open area in the trees and counted nests, about 25 that we could clearly distinguish, and noticed some grebes actively building nests.
Most of the nesting grebes were Western, with only a few Clark's. We made note of the nests that were very established, and others that were worrisome in their precariousness (first time parents?). I made a short video of the sight, mostly to enjoy the deafening sounds of the grebes' kreed-kreek, not exactly a rattle, and S. learned that the Westerns kreed-kreeeek while the Clark's just kreeeeeeek. We returned to the boat launch, where we encountered what would sadly become a familiar sight on our daily returns: individuals fishing, likely without licenses, and throwing out their garbage and used line into the lake or just dropping it where they were standing even though a garbage can stood less than 10 yards away. Of course, S. filed a citizen complaint to California Fish and Wildlife.
The boat launch is perfectly located at the junction where the slough becomes the big water, the lake itself. When Western and Clark's grebes hatch, as we learned from a local birder, they clamber onto their parents' backs, and their parents take them immediately from the nesting ground in the slough to the big water. This differed from the pied-billed grebes we had staked out in Baskett. There, the pied-bills stayed near their nests for weeks, and their clown-striped babies matured wading in and out of the safe cover of reeds.
We watched for grebe pairs heading out to the big water. Two grebes had back feathers all ruffled up: this became a reliable sign of hidden treasure.
Grebe chicks, usually two siblings, nestle tucked under this feathery cover. If you spot this and follow the grebe closely, you'll be rewarded with the sight of an emerging grey downy head, sometimes two, one facing forward (intrepid first-born) and one facing behind. We spotted a couple of grebe parent pairs with chicks, but we were dismayed to see fishing boats and kayakers violating the 300 foot regulation buffer zone and boating perilously close to grebes and grebe nests. I got some decent shots of these first chicks, and we made a plan to visit the grebes every day after work.
On the drive back to our camper, I noticed a pull-out with dense foliage. We stopped and discovered a clearing just beyond the shrubbery and trees. Here opened up an even more populous nesting site, more than 50. Since it lies further away from the mouth of the lake, it is better protected from boaters and kayakers. I counted five eggs in one nest! Many grebes were reinforcing nests and repositioning themselves, revealing eggs, so we tried to memorize the number of eggs and placement of these nests to keep track.
On our following visit to the initial nesting site, we were extremely distressed to see that most of the 25 plus nests had been abandoned or disappeared. Two grebe pairs remained. We still aren't sure what happened, but we suspect a motorized boat must have come through the site. We were sad for the grebes, for all of their work making nests, laying eggs, and incubating these eggs to have them instantly destroyed from human carelessness or indifference. On later visits, a few grebe pairs did return, but it was so quiet without the chorus of kreeeking of the initial colony. We asked a fellow birder who we had often run into at the boat ramp if he had seen any babies. He had over the weekend, but he also had seen a kayaker photographer deliberately breach the 300 foot buffer zone and in doing so, had overturned one nest and possibly another. He showed us a video he took on his phone, and we later discovered to our great chagrin that this individual was a known birder in the community. Apparently, he cared more about getting a good shot then respecting the safety and sanctity of nature. His ego overrode the rights of the nesting grebes to a habitat undisturbed by human intrusion, and even if indeliberately, he destroyed the chances of at least one brood and future generation. How can we get people who fish or kayak to respect the rules if someone who presumably cares about birds flouts them?
Our fellow birder, an older Asian American, told us that since the nests were empty, we wouldn't be running into him anymore because he was heading to other spots to try to capture photos of the chicks on the big water. We said our goodbyes, then continued down the road to the to the "secret" site, where several of the nesting pairs had disappeared, leaving behind empty nests. One nest that had held two eggs had fallen apart, and we witnessed two grebes, who we presumed the parents, eeringly staring into the water proximate to the disintegrated nest. It was such a strange and tragic sight: were they staring into the water to try to locate where the eggs had sunk? Were they trying to figure out what happened? They held their gaze for so long that we finally looked elsewhere. The nest with five eggs was left completely unguarded, with no grebe nearby. This didn't look promising. On subsequent returns to the site, all except one of the five eggs disappeared: otter lunches? One nest, however, revealed jagged and broken egg shells that testified to a successful hatch. We decided to follow suit of the older birder and head out to the big water to see what we could see.
A lot of the Clear Lake waterfront is not accessible because of private ownership. Lakeside County Park contains a couple of lush inlets and a fishing pier, but the grebes stayed a good distance from the shore. Only Mute Swans and Canada Geese were willing to stay so close to human presence. With my binoculars, I spied some smaller lumps swimming around grebes and pointed them out to S. We just couldn't see much detail so I turned to my zoom lens to capture photos so we could get a closer look. "Look, Mom, all grown up!" What we saw were perfect little grebes, still fuzzy with remnant down but now sporting white feathers and pale grey standing in for the inky-black crown and stripe running down the long elegant neck of an adult. These youngsters swam and dove as if they'd been doing it for years rather than a couple of weeks. We imagined dozens of their nesting cohort swimming out there in the middle of the big water beyond the scope of our binoculars and zoom lens, and we hoped they would remain safe from the fishing boats and jet skis and live to return to Rodman Slough to build their own nest and family.
