Field Note: Carried Across Deep Time

A Lake Beaumaris Field Note on Red-necked Grebes, back-brooding chicks, and their unexpected kinship with flamingos.

At Lake Beaumaris in northern Edmonton, a small family of Red-necked Grebes moved across the summer water with quiet purpose: two attentive adults and their tiny, striped young tucked snugly into the feathers of a parent’s back.

This behaviour is called back-brooding, and it turns the adult grebe into a living nursery. The chicks ride high and sheltered, warmed by the parent’s body, supported by its dense feathers, and protected above the shifting surface of the lake. Watching the striped chicks disappear into the soft plumage, it was easy to understand why some birders and photographers affectionately call them grebettes.

While one parent carried the chicks, the other worked the lake. It would move ahead, dive, vanish, and surface again with food for the waiting young. The whole scene had a rhythm: dive, surface, deliver, repeat. A family’s daily work, carried out in plain view.

Grebes can look familiar at first glance, moving among the ducks, loons, and coots that share our local waters, but resemblance is a poor guide to kinship. Their closest living relatives are flamingos. Together, the two lineages form the clade Mirandornithes (Latin for wonderful birds), an ancient branch of the avian family tree.

The precise timing of their separation varies among studies, but the relationship reaches tens of millions of years into the past, deep into the early history of modern birds. At that time, early primate relatives were still small, mostly tree-dwelling mammals moving through ancient forests. The family crossing Lake Beaumaris was therefore more than a tender local scene. It was also a glimpse into deep time: striped chicks carried above an Alberta lake by a bird whose evolutionary story leads, unexpectedly, toward flamingos in distant shallows.

I came for a photograph of a grebe family. I left thinking about hidden kinships, small lives carried on broad backs, and the deep history moving quietly across the water.

Sources and further reading

Kloskowski, J. (2003). “Brood reduction in the Red-necked Grebe Podiceps grisegena.” Ibis, 145(2), 233–243. doi:10.1046/j.1474-919X.2003.00145.x
van Tuinen, M., Butvill, D. B., Kirsch, J. A. W., & Hedges, S. B. (2001). “Convergence and divergence in the evolution of aquatic birds.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 268(1474), 1345–1350. doi:10.1098/rspb.2001.1679
Mayr, G. (2004). “Morphological evidence for sister group relationship between flamingos (Aves: Phoenicopteridae) and grebes (Podicipedidae).” Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 140(2), 157–169. doi:10.1111/j.1096-3642.2003.00094.x
Sangster, G. (2005). “A name for the flamingo–grebe clade.” Ibis, 147(3), 612–615. doi:10.1111/j.1474-919X.2005.00432.x
Stiller, J., Feng, S., Chowdhury, A. A., et al. (2024). “Complexity of avian evolution revealed by family-level genomes.” Nature, 629, 851–860. doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07323-1