It’s actually a horned grebe (Podiceps auritus) in the surf.
The part of the North American population of these birds overwinters on the Atlantic Coast. They breed in the interior of Canada and Alaska.
Europeans call these birds Slavonian or Slav grebes.
Ours is the great crested grebe. Their numbers got very low here, way back, when being killed for the hat trade but numbers have long since recovered.
One of the most wonderful life enhancing experiences we ever had was walking across the walkway over the Thames at Hambleden weir one spring and passing within three feet of a floating nest where the parents seemed oblivious to the humans passing back and forth.
It was a wonderful moment as we passed at the exact time the pretty striped chicks left the nest and climbed onto the back of a parent before they all sailed off like a little boat with passengers, never to return again to that nest. Right up to the crucial moment of abandonment, while one parent still sat protecting the chicks, the other had been adding fresh nesting material obsessively, right up the last minute. We had never seen this ritual in our lives before and I doubt we will live to see it again. One chick was reluctant to leave the nest and so parents and siblings just waited until the late one was ready about ten minutes after the others had abandoned ship.
While we were watching, a small crowd gathered and many pictures and videos were taken by various people and we all agreed in soft whispers that it was a very special thing that we had witnessed. The grebes simply ignored all the people as if we were just part of the landscape. They had become habituated to people passing at this popular tourist spot and it was a credit to humanity that all those thousands of people must have behaved discreetly during all the time the grebes had been sitting. Those of us lucky enough to be there that day were privileged to see something very rarely observed, one would assume.
On another occasion near that same spot we watched fascinated as daddy grebe was teaching one ‘teenager’ to catch fish. Dad would dive, catch a small fish, bring it to the surface, not dead but injured, so that the young grebe student would take over and finish the job. It took several injured fish before the youngster learned how to do it. Each time the young grebe failed, dad would eat the fish rather than it go to waste.
What a lovely thing to have seen. I’ve seen the chicks being shuttled about by the parents, but never something so intimate. They’re one of my favourite local species to see, especially when they are doing their dance.
I happen to live an relatively grebe-less part of North America. The only ones that nest here are pied-billed grebes or “dye-dippers,” as they are known in local parlance. It has a rounded bill, so it looks even more like a sea monster.
A horned grebe once landed at my high school. The state had a law that all classrooms must have natural light coming into them, so any classrooms that were facing toward the center of the building towards a central area where the light would come in. There was an interior courtyard that was created for this purpose alone. Unfortunately we had not access to it. But it looked enough like a body of water for a grebe to land in it and then become stuck.
No one had ever seen a horned grebe before, and the weird thing was that I was called in to identify it. The biology teacher put it in a tank and fed it worms. It was released the next day.