Magical creatures
AN APPRECIATION OF THE GREBE
Great crested grebes love February like we love Christmas. While we spend January lying low, recovering from the season of excess, these freshwater diving birds are busy glamming up their dull-brown winter plumage with brindle-like black and orange facial ruffs (think hamster cheeks) and glossy black tippets, or ear tufts. If you’re going to attract a mate, you want to look your best: courtship season is quite the calendar event if you’re a great crested grebe.
Now resembling a ginger-punk cormorant, these birds rely on more than looks to find a mate, establishing and bonding as pairs with an intricate, dance-like courtship ritual. Basic moves include head-shaking (‘Have you seen my tippet?’), bill-dipping (‘…and my ruff from this angle?’), and preening, which looks a bit like stopping to scratch their backs. Courting pairs perform these deft movements face to face, mirroring each other in a mesmerising routine, but it turns out that this is just the warm-up act.
To seal the deal, you need to perfect your elegance through the water. In a dramatic finale, pairs swim towards each other, low in the water and at speed, stopping short of collision to come beak to beak, paddling furiously so that their bodies extend well above the water line. Only their legs and feet are left submerged, their arching necks coming together in what appears as a love-heart shape.
The grebes then repeat head-flicking and beak-dipping, only this time with a beak full of waterweed. Not only do great crested grebes need good looks and a fine repertoire of moves, it’s also de rigueur to have the right accessories.
These tufty-headed trendsetters are very much birds of the water. They’re not much good at flying – favouring large bodies of water, such as lakes and reservoirs where there’s enough room for take-off – yet their swimming skills are honed, diving for the small fish and aquatic invertebrates that make up their diet. Building floating nests, they’re even skilled enough to give their prettily striped ducklings protective piggyback rides when newly hatched.
However, behind the plumage and prancing lies a story of great recovery. The UK’s 4,600 resident pairs of great crested grebes numbered just 30 around 150 years ago. These fantastic-looking fowl were hunted for their densely packed ruff feathers, which were used to line capes, hats and muffs. The Great Exhibition of 1851 showcased dozens of accessories sporting grebe feathers, bolstering their fashion credentials and triggering the species’ near-demise.
Luckily an academic paper by Julian Huxley in 1912, documenting great crested grebes’ behaviour, was not only important for ornithology – nobody had analysed patterns of bird behaviour so extensively before – but also for the species, highlighting their endangered status. Thankfully, fashions changed and the RSPB was on the scene, campaigning against the trade of bird feathers – and the rest is history. And great crested grebes are not.