You don't need to tell me that the picture quality is lousy. The bird was quite far away, I extended my lens as far as it would go, and later cropped the heck out of the picture. As a result you can see the pixels.
My defense is that this was the first time (June 24 at Ellis Creek in Petaluma) I have ever seen a Pied-billed Grebe. These birds create an open bowl type nest in a platform of floating vegetation, loosely anchored to float with the waves. When they leave their nest they cover the eggs with vegetation. After a period of time the vegetation will stain the eggs and help conceal them better. Grebes have legs set far back on the body, an adaptation to a life of swimming underwater to catch prey. As a consequence they walk poorly and are rarely found on land.
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