Known for its remarkable and elaborate courtship dance in early spring and the beautiful crest of feathers around its head, the great crested grebe is an elegant waterbird. Its diet is thought to consist mostly of fish.
So, it came as a surprise to birdwatcher and photographer Juan Montiel when they spotted two great crested grebes hunting common chiffchaffs at Las Cañas, an artificial reservoir and nature reserve in the Navarre region of northern Spain.
Montiel observed that, as the chiffchaffs were hunting small flying insects and invertebrates on the water’s surface, two great crested grebes would approach the warblers stealthily. The grebes would then catch a chiffchaff, drown it, then swallow it – albeit with difficulty. During the 90-minute observation session, two further unsuccessful hunting attempts were seen.
The photos and report of the behaviour appeared on the French birding website Ornithomedia.
This isn’t the first time great crested grebes have been observed catching and eating birds flying over the water. In 2019, Durham Wildlife Trust shared a video on Facebook, showing a great crested grebe at the Trust’s Rainton Meadows Nature Reserve in England eating a sand martin that it had caught. The video caption mentioned that this behaviour had first been observed a few years previously.
In addition, a coot chick wing was found in the stomach of a great crested grebe in Chile, reported in 1925. Another species, the pied-billed grebe, was observed catching and eating a masked warbler in California in 2016.
Grebes have also been reported to pluck and eat their own feathers, an unusual and unique behaviour that has long puzzled ornithologists. A description of the black-necked grebe – a species known as the eared grebe in North America, due to ear tufts – from 1577 says, "Its food is its feathers, only sometimes it eats fish.” It is thought that the feathers aid the digestion of its prey. Great crested grebes have also been observed plucking their own feathers and feeding them to their chicks.
The great crested grebe once faced extinction in England. It was hunted for its much-admired feathers and, at one point in the 1860s, there were only 32 known pairs in the country. Following protection, its population increased and has remained stable since the 1990s. It is included on the Green List of species in the Birds of Conservation Concern.
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