Pied-eye grebe, Little Fresh Pond, Fresh Pond Reserve, April 2015. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

I have been chasing the little fellow in Figure 1 for the last couple of weeks in hopes of getting a decent photograph of what I thought was an American Coot.  He is in fact a pied-eye glebe. The give away was the fact that his eyes were not red like those of a coot, and his bill, while white, had that little black band. But what of pied-eye and what does it have to do with the pied piper? Pie comes from the black and white magpie, and pied appears to means blotchy.  As for the piper, that medieval pedophile, who lured children into the woods, he is described and depicted in clothes of many colors.

The image of Figure 1 is the best that I have been able to manage so far, as I have yet to get very close to the little fellow.  I think that the grebe falls under the category as to be so ugly or plain as to be beautiful.  Certainly the eyes and face are appealing, as is the modesty of his tail.

As for identification of birds, I’d like to suggest for those of you interested in such things a clever, a free cell phone App from my alma mater, Cornell University, called the Merlin Bird ID App. It asks for the date, your location, and a few questions about the bird and then gives you pictures of the most likely candidates.  You then confirm which one is correct and this feeds back to the folks at the Sapsucker Woods Ornithology lab to improve the App’s accuracy.  It nailed the grebe immediately. I think that it is also worth mentioning that even when you get a Bad” or “failed” photograph of a bird that your not sure of, the photograph is a tool onto itself in providing details that you might otherwise have not seen or not recorded in your mental note.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM Lens hand-held at 200 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture-Priority AE mode at 1/1600th sec at f/10.0 with + 1 exposure compensation and center auto focus.