Pied-Billed Grebe | Podilymbus podiceps

Voice

The song is a loud, hollow series that starts with a rattling kek-kek-kek and slows into a cuckoo-like cow-cow-cow-cowp, falling away at the end. On the breeding grounds it is given at dawn and dusk, often from inside cover. Vagrants in Europe are almost always silent, so do not count on hearing anything.

Identification

A dumpy, uniformly grey-brown grebe, larger and heavier than Little Grebe, with a short neck and a fluffy white rear end cocked up like a powder puff. The bill decides it: short, deep and laterally compressed with a curved culmen, in breeding plumage pale blue-white with a clean black vertical band, and with a black throat patch above it. In winter the bill is horn-yellow without a band, the throat is dull white and the face is warm buff below a dark crown. A thin white eye-ring is visible at close range. Birds often sink slowly like a submarine rather than diving.

Confusion species

Little Grebe is the only real pitfall, and the comparison comes down to three things. The bill: thin, pointed and dark on Little Grebe with a bright green gape spot, short, deep and pale on Pied-Billed Grebe, black-banded in summer. Head shape: round and neat on Little Grebe, blocky on Pied-Billed with a steep forehead and a flat crown. Size and tone: Little Grebe is clearly smaller and shows chestnut cheeks and neck in breeding plumage, while Pied-Billed stays an even coffee-brown and shows a more obvious white stern.

Habitat

Small, sheltered fresh waters with plenty of marginal vegetation: reed fringes, clay pits, gravel pits, town ponds, canals and slow rivers. In Europe birds are almost always found on such small waters, often a reservoir or a reed-fringed fish pond, and rarely on large open water.

Range and movements

The species ranges over North, Central and South America. In Europe it is a rare vagrant: near-annual in the Azores, with scattered occurrences in the British Isles, elsewhere in western Europe and in north-west Iberia, chiefly Galicia and the Cantabrian coast. A bird in the British Isles paired with a Little Grebe in the 1960s and reared hybrid young, a record still quoted whenever the species comes up. Most records fall between late autumn and spring, and the birds often stay long on the same water.

How and when to look

Look between October and December, after a run of Atlantic depressions, on reservoirs, gravel pits and reed-fringed fish ponds, and check every Little Grebe on such waters. Long stays are the rule, so a reported bird is usually still there the next day. Watch for the individual that hangs around the reed edge and sinks quietly out of sight instead of diving briskly.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened and widespread across the Americas, although breeding sites are lost locally where marshes are drained or cleared. In Europe the species is far too rare to manage for; the only practical concern is disturbance to long-staying birds by observers pressing too close to the bank.

Scientific name

Podilymbus podiceps | (Linnaeus, 1758)

Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Colymbus podiceps; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Podilymbus was introduced in 1831 by Lesson. Podilymbus is a contraction of Latin podicipes 'feet at the buttocks', the stem of Podiceps, and Ancient Greek kolumbos 'diver', familiar from the old genus name Colymbus. podiceps is the older genus name Podiceps, Latin podex, podicis 'vent' and pes 'foot', kept on here as the specific epithet. The specimen the first description was based on came from South Carolina.