Red-necked Grebe Chicks With Parent

One chick seems to be looking adoringly up at it’s parent, but look closely at the adult’s bill. It’s holding a small feather and that’s the chick’s focus. Grebes feed their young preened feathers. This is a common behavior

From Audobon:
Strange as it sounds, grebes do indeed eat their own feathers. Eared Grebes eat mainly brine shrimp and aquatic insects, which have rigid exoskeletons, making them both tough to digest and potentially damaging to the intestines.

So, grebes evolved to use their feathers as a way to slow down digestion. After the bird swallows them, the feathers enter a three-part stomach — first a storage chamber, then a gizzard, and lastly a pouch. The feathers form dense balls in both the gizzard and final pouch and appear to slow the passage of food long enough that the food can be safely liquified.

The tough bits are then regurgitated within a ball of feathers, much the way owls spit up pellets of bones from their prey. A grebe may pop out as many as six feather balls in an evening.

Minnesota Lake