My sighting of the day is a bird that made my dad laugh. I mean its name made him laugh. At least when I said it. I was just a kid.

I saw this bird again today on a small lake near my house. If my dad were still around, he’d have called it a duck. And he’d have had a famous proverb to back him up: “If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck!”

This dubious wisdom is attributed to a guy named James Whitcomb Riley. Funny how poets have fancy middle names. Would he have been famous if he were known as Jim Riley? If a guy named Jim Riley said, “If it walks like a duck…” would anybody listen?

But Riley was wrong about the duck thing. The bird I saw swam like a duck but it was no duck. It was….okay, here’s the part where my dad would laugh if he were around…..it was a Pied-billed Grebe.

You can’t blame my dad for laughing at the name. And for being surprised at me. Why would a little boy call a duck a “Pied-billed Grebe?” Could that kid grow up to be a two-fisted guy?

Well, yeah.

I liked seeing the grebe today, as I do every year around this time. I like watching its disappearing act. Every few seconds it drops under the surface, then pops up a few yards away.

Other than that, it looks like a duck. But it’s a grebe. And the markings on its beak are “pied.” Pied means mottled. At least it did back when bird-namers used words like “pied.”

So, today I saw a Pied-billed Grebe. It’s got a funny name. And I’m still an odd duck for knowing it. This made me think of my dad and I laughed, just like he did.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 3:57 pm and is filed under "Daily Sightings" A Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.