Cabby's Blog: A New Beginning

Last week I went up to Klamath Falls for a day because I had heard that the Grebes were out showing off their babies. I changed my Facebook cover and profile pictures with a couple of images from that trip. However, they are just two of many. It was a wonderful, wonderful day with the birds. Not only were there grebes but I spotted a Green Heron fishing and discovered a rookery of Great Egrets and Great Blue Herons. If anyone was watching me, no doubt he/she would have thought that I was dottier than all of you know me to be. I spent hours belly laughing between the clumsiness of baby birds, the Green Heron's difficulty with getting his prey down the hatch and then the grown Egret and Heron babies dealing with very gusty winds and not wanting to leave the security of their nests. I took over 100gb of photos and I laughed all over again when I went through them.

On my way home I decided to make some changes. I deleted all the old blog posts and am starting with a clean slate. Since retiring on April 4th, I've been going through all of my photos, reprocessing them and have started a new website. There are approximately 200 images on it now and I still have lots more to go through. At some point I will also offer ways of purchasing photos but that will take a while since I need to complete a portfolio for a class I'm taking. If you want to visit the site, it's http://www.cabbybloss.net . I hope you enjoy it!

Because I saw so many different grebe behaviors, I learned more about them after taking the pictures. Western and Clark's Grebes carry their young around of their backs with both parents actively participating in their upbringing. One parent will be toting the kids while the other fishes for their food. I could always tell when food was coming their way as the parent and the kids made all kinds of noise. I thought that one parent, like the Mom, had the kids all day while Dad fished, but after witnessing the kids getting dumped and then boarding the other parent, I realized it definitely was equal opportunity parenting. Part of their diet is also feathers. The parents would often present the chicks with feathers to eat although they weren't too thrilled about eating them. Come to find out, all grebes eat a fair amount of feathers to help with digesting the fish bones and not just any feather, but the small soft ones that are typically found near the tail of the bird. The other behavior that had me in stitches was watching the chicks get back on their parents back.

The photos below tell a bit of a story. By the way, all of the photos except for the one up top are of Clark's Grebes. Unfortunately the Western's only came out when the light was really bad! Do you know how to tell the Western and Clark Grebes apart?

Gravy Train is coming!