Scouting Loons and Grebes

Curiosity Got the Best of Me

A few weeks had passed since I last ventured to photograph waterfowl so I towed my boat to a couple of lakes looking to see the status of nesting loons, red-necked grebes and western grebes.

The morning was chilly, 41 degrees when I launched my boat into Clearwater Lake. Typically I can see a loon or two from the boat landing but not on this morning. I took a leisurely drive around most of the lake and I only spotted 2 pair of loons. Surely more were on this body of water and my guess is they were holding tight to nesting cover on this cold May morning. I stopped briefly to photograph one pair fishing just out of the wind blown area making this photographer a happy camper.

The red-necked grebe population on this body of water appears to be good and I easly found numerous red-necked grebes including a few that appeared to be on nests.

Scouting a bit more I saw a loon buried in the shoreline cover and soon I saw it’s mate hovering near by. Continuing around likely cover I ran into one more loon. It was now after 9am and with a high bright sun and some wind I decided to go fishing for a while before making the decision to head to Lake Osakis for the evening running of the western grebes.

Arriving at Osakis around 4:30 I immediately heard the western grebes followed shortly by actual sighting of westerns that had gathered mid-lake. I found that to be somewhat unusual but so be it. Among the westerns were quite a few red-necked grebes along with rafts of coot. Making my rounds into know western habitat I found myself placed among quite a few westerns with the hope many of them would be running on the water for the next 4 hours. I say hoping because I’ve been here many times and the grebes don’t necessarily always run across the water. Within minutes I saw 3 of them run and that was it for the next hour or so. I noticed an area where the grebes appeared to be more more in tune with mating displays so I moved my boat position to a spot where I was ready to capture them running across the water. Unfortunately the grebes weren’t in a running mood and I only had one brief chance to get that image.

As I drove back to the boat landing I pondered the first couple of times I made the trip to see western grebes run. This was in 2011 and the western grebes ran all day long from sunrise to sunset. Since then I’ve made about 6 trips to watch this better than cool behavior with very minimal running or breeding displays. I will certainly make another trip to Lake Osakis to see the westerns run across the water. Maybe even this year. Stay tuned.