Piggy back bird babies

Our lockdown lake walks have shown us many baby birds: coots, swans, geese (Canadian and Egyptian), mallards and moorhens have all produced young. There's usually a pair of great crested grebes on the water, but they didn't seem to reproduce last year. This year they had a nest and sat on it for ages, and today the nest was empty. After a while, we spotted one grebe, I assume the mother, in the middle of the lake. Binoculars revealed she had two chicks with her, and they were sitting on her back. Apparently this is normal for grebes. She just sat there drifting gently around while the chicks looked around at the world and fluttered a bit. Eventually the other grebe turned up, I assume with food.

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