Grebo Guru
by Steve Xoh

ILiving by the Thames, I see a lot of grebes. And every time I see one, the 1990s Pop Will Eat Itself song Grebo Guru comes to mind. (Which, if you don’t know it, is a song about 1990s subculture, not common river birds.) This automatic brain connection started to really annoy me, so I wondered if painting a grebe with the words GREBO GURU would exorcise it from my psyche. I’m not yet sure if this worked, but doing the painting led me down a fascinating grebe rabbit hole.

I wasn’t sure whether to paint a whole grebe or just a grebe’s head. So I did some research to find a reference image for a whole grebe and it was then that I discovered the first of many weird things about these birds. Like many other water birds, grebes are brilliant swimmers and divers. But what sets them apart is that their legs are positioned ridiculously far back on their bodies. In fact, the Latin name for the great crested grebe is Podiceps cristatus. Podiceps derives from the Latin for rump and foot, meaning that even in scientific terms they are basically known as the crested arse-foot bird! Realising that I had never seen a grebe out of water, I looked for a video of them walking and was amazed to see how freaky they look when they do. I also discovered that they do not have webbed feet but individual big lobed toes, meaning that their whole leg ensemble is incredibly strange compared to other birds. I can’t help but imagine that their embarrassment at all of this is why they hardly venture onto land

I was so delighted to discover that I lived in close proximity to such a strange creature so did some more research. I found out that they eat their own feathers. Not accidentally, but deliberately, frequently and in large quantities to help with their digestion. They also feed their feathers to their babies, who ride around on their backs like some sort of river taxi. And, in some species, these babies come with an in-built mood indicator/warning light: the heads of some western grebe chicks change colour and become red when they need food or attention. And the grebe’s bizarre wiggly-weed-offering courtship dance cements their place in the top five creatures I am likely to obsessively talk about to anyone who will listen.

Sadly, great crested grebes were almost wiped out in Victorian Britain as their feathers became prized decorations for hats and clothing. At one point it is believed that there were only 32 known breeding pairs left in England, but thankfully they have made a wonderful recovery and can now be spotted quite prolifically on rivers and lakes across Britain and Europe.

So, the next time you see a grebe gracefully moving across the surface of the water, looking like some kind of calm, dignified, professional bird, I hope you take some personal inspiration from knowing that, behind this facade, they are in fact very eccentric avian weirdos.