What a surprise! On my morning walk around Cattail Lake there were six pair of Eared Grebes. I have only ever seen them in Yellowstone but here they are. I know they nest in colonies, so maybe six pair could be a colony? I’m so excited that we may have baby Grebes close to home this year! The young ride on their parent’s back for the first two weeks of their lives. What a sight that would be! Let’s see what a little research turns up.
Trumpeter Swans, beautiful and majestic, are North America’s largest waterfowl and heaviest flying bird. This dark, windy winter day is brightened by this white beauty keeping an eye on us as she guards her family. Females are called a pens and males are cobs.
Trumpeter Swans are a native species to North America. Most Trumpeters weigh 21-30 pounds, although large males can reach 35 pounds. Standing on the ground, an adult male can stand four feet high. With a wingspan over seven feet carrying that heavy body, Trumpeters need at least 100 yard “runway” of open water; running hard and fast across the surface of the water in order to generate enough speed for take off. What a sight!
Beginning in the late 1800s, Trumpeter’s were hunted to near extinction for their feathers to adorn fashionable hats, skin for face powder puffs, and long flight feathers coveted for writing quills. Aggressive conservation efforts helped the species recover by the early 2000’s. Since they generally build their nests atop beaver or muskrat dens, overhunting of these rodents diminished breeding habitat for Trumpeters. As the rodent populations recovered, the swan numbers improved. One of these years you’d think we’d recognize that this world is a system with each part relying on the others, including animals, bugs, birds, plants and people, hopefully helping preserve the balance. Sigh . . . but we did good helping the Trumpeters since in most of their range there are healthy populations that continue to increase.
Nests are sometimes built on large floating mats of vegetation. Their nest can be 11 feet across and 3 feet high and is often used by the same pair year after year. The young swans, called cygnets, turn white at about 1-1/2 years old. There are usually four to six eggs in a swan’s clutch. Trumpeters have an unusual way of incubating their eggs: they warm the eggs by covering them with their webbed feet. Once hatched in June, the cygnets can swim and feed within 24 hours. By 15 weeks they will have gained over a pound a week reaching up to 20 lbs. and will now be able to fly.
We are told Trumpeters mate for life, but it appears that they change mates a number of times over their lifetimes of more than 20 years. Cygnets stay with the parents over their first winter, but the parents chase them away in the spring as they begin planning for their next family. The young swans stay in sibling groups until about two years old when they themselves start the search for a mate and a new life in a remote open-water area.
Dusky Grouse are so interesting and this year I had an up-close and personal encounter (see below). Here is a male in full mating display in June, too busy courting to bother with us. He struts and hops with tail raised and fanned, neck feathers spread revealing his bright neck-skin patch, loud wing thumping, and making a deep wump-wump-wump, a sound that can be heard great distances by springtime hikers. These birds, about the size of a chicken and weighing up to three pounds, would rather walk than fly. Best known by locals for scaring the daylights out of you. You’ll be walking a trail, they wait until you are about two feet away, and fly up in a rapid, flurried take off almost hitting you. Yikes, my heart!
Turbulent, icy cold waters is where you will find these small, brightly colored waterfowl called Harlequins ducks. The largest ducks are about 16″ from the tip of their tail to tip of their bill. In winter they choose the roughest northern coastal waters, but in summer they grace the wild, swirling LeHardy Rapids on the Yellowstone River to mate. The females will remain here raising the young through the summer, returning north in early autumn. These diving ducks feed on crustaceans, small fish, insects, and other assorted life they find as they swim underwater and even walk on the bottom searching the rocks for food. Studies have shown many adult Harlequins have had broken bones, probably a result of living in such rough surroundings. Welcome back Harlequins!
