An Eared Grebe far from the salt lakes settles on Morse Reservoir

An Eared Grebe (*Podiceps nigricollis*) has been sitting on the water at Morse Park, on the shore of Morse Reservoir in Noblesville, since at least the second week of September.¹ Birders have reported a single bird there thirteen times, most recently on September 14.¹

This is a western bird. Eared Grebes nest on prairie marshes and shallow alkaline lakes from the Dakotas west to the Sierra, and most of them never come this far east.² In central Indiana the small grebe that usually shows up on the reservoirs in fall is the Horned Grebe, and by mid-September the two look alike enough that the differences matter. Both have shed their breeding colors; the Eared Grebe's black neck and gold ear tufts are gone by now. What is left is a dusky little diver with a peaked crown. The peak sits at the center of the head on an Eared Grebe and toward the back on a Horned Grebe. The Eared Grebe's forehead rises steeply, its neck is thinner, and its bill is finer, with the lower edge angled slightly upward so the whole bill looks tipped up. Its face is the best mark at a distance: on a Horned Grebe the white cheek and neck are clean and bright, with a straight border against the dark cap; on an Eared Grebe the gray bleeds down into the cheek and the neck stays gray rather than white. An Eared Grebe also rides with its rear end cocked up out of the water, which a Horned Grebe does not do.

How this species spends its autumn is unlike almost any other bird. From late summer into November nearly the whole North American population, close to 99 percent of it, flies to two salt lakes, Mono Lake in California and Great Salt Lake in Utah, to feed on brine shrimp and alkali flies.³ There each bird more than doubles its weight, from around 260 grams to over 600, while its digestive organs swell and its chest muscles shrink by about half. The birds become flightless for three to four months while they fatten, then rebuild the flight muscles and leave for the Gulf of California and the Salton Sea.³ Because a version of this cycle repeats several times a year, the Eared Grebe spends roughly nine to ten months of each year unable to fly, longer than any other bird that still flies at all.

The bird at Morse Park is not doing any of that. There are no brine shrimp in a freshwater reservoir, so it is diving with its feet for what the impoundment offers: small fish, insect larvae, and small crustaceans. It flew here and will have to fly on, so its chest muscles are intact. It is a bird that peeled away from the movement toward the salt lakes, or was never headed there, and settled on the largest open water it could find in a county of till-plain farmland and subdivisions. Morse Reservoir is a dammed stretch of Cicero Creek, and to a grebe that is what matters: deep enough to dive in, wide enough to be seen from and to leave from.

Anyone checking from the park should look for a lone, low-floating bird well out from shore, smaller than a coot, diving often and staying down long. If it is still around, the face pattern and the tipped-up bill will settle the identification.