The river Rhine is freezing.
The open water spaces get smaller and smaller.
In one of them, near a bridge this morning, mallards and coots. Two mute swans.
And great crested grebes. Two of them are obviously in love.
This video is called Great Crested Grebe Courtship Dance.
A bit further, about twenty black-headed gulls and some herring gulls on the ice.
No sign yet of the more unusual birds of earlier cold winters here. Like tufted ducks; which I have seen often then; goosanders (a few times) and goldeneyes (once).
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Dear Kitty. Some blog 
wonderfulllllll!!!! ♥
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Thank you!
I hope to see more great crested grebes this year 🙂
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🙂
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Very sweet. Saw my very first grebe in the flesh just last week. I was very excited.
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Was it a great crested grebe?
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No it was a little grebe. Tiny, but very cute nonetheless. We do get crested in NZ, but not in areas I usually travel to.
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So, an Australasian little grebe?
See
http://www.nzbirds.com/birds/australasianlittlegrebe.html
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Or this one?
http://www.nzbirds.com/birds/weweia.html
Weweia, the New Zealand dabchick
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Thanks for those links. I was pretty sure that it was the Australasian Little Grebe, but looking at those illustrations I am more inclined to say it was a weweia. It was in the South Island, where neither are supposed to be found, in a town called Takaka (in the actual town itself). The nearby Waikoropupu springs host a number of water birds, and next time I go I’ll have a good peer into the reeds to see if I can spot any grebes.
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“Poliocephalus rufopectus is endemic to New Zealand. The remaining population is restricted to North Island with a wide but fragmented distribution. Occasional vagrants have appeared in the north of South Island since the late 1980s. In 2012, a pair bred near Takaka, representing the first confirmed breeding record on South Island since 1941 (K. Owen in litt. 2012).”
http://www.birdlife.org/datazone/speciesfactsheet.php?id=3636
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Well, that has pretty well narrowed that down! It is probably a good sign that they bred in a built up area (well, sort of built-up). Lots of water birds in NZ have flourished in the last 20 years by moving in with people, a bit like the market herons you posted video of. Also, on a related subject, our white-faced herons (matuku) seem to have left the coast and wetlands and started living on farms. I’ve seen hundreds hanging around irrigators and I presume that they are feeding off invertebrates such as earthworms. There are certainly not any frogs or fish for them to eat.
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In Europe about 1900, both grey herons and great crested grebes used to be hunted and shy.
Now, both are urban to a large extent.
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