Horned Grebe star of blog and YouTube. :)
Pretty fancy constuming wouldn't you say? Those feathers look almost good enough to eat. Apparently the grebe thinks so too. Professional bird nerds don't know exactly why, but grebes eat their own feathers. Lots of them. It's a little like us biting our nails. The most popular explanation is that Grebe's gizzards don't work all that well grinding up sharp fishbones. They eat a lot of those too. So, as the story goes, the bird eats fish with sharp bones, his gizzard* won't keep up, so he eats feathers to keep from getting punched full of holes. Maybe. But didn't anyone ever think it might just be a bad habit? :)
*(see ventriculus.....if you want)
[Want to see where you might find one of these birds? This link will take you to the way cool interactive range map at ebird.org.]
