Boreal Reflections

The water was glass. Not a breath of wind moved across the boreal lake, not a ripple broke the mirrored symmetry of cattails and black spruce. I was chest-deep in water with a float blind doing what it designed for, camera resting on the edge of the mesh opening, lens hood just inches above the water’s surface. Mosquitoes buzzed at my ears. A swamp sparrow sang somewhere behind me. And then, with barely a wake, the red-necked grebe glided into frame—chick tucked between its scapulars, a tiny beak poking through downy feathers like a periscope breaching calm water.

For three weeks I had followed this pair. From the nest, half-sunken and barely visible amid pond lilies, to this moment—parent and chick as one, crossing the mirror of a northern wetland. I’d come here to photograph a story few people ever see. What I found was a natural history marvel riding quietly on the back of another.

Red-necked grebes (Podiceps grisegena) are masterful parents. Unlike most waterbirds, which usher their young into the world and into danger with equal speed, grebes carry their offspring—literally. As soon as the chicks hatch, often still wet from the shell, they clamber onto their parents’ backs. There, nestled in soft down and shielded by the arch of wing coverts, they ride out their first days: warm, safe, and elevated above the cold shock of northern water.

This behavior, though charming on the surface, is an evolutionary triumph. Newly hatched grebe chicks are semi-precocial: they’re alert, mobile, and capable of begging, but they lack the insulation and coordination to survive prolonged exposure in water. Predators like pike, mink, or bald eagles would make short work of a vulnerable chick adrift alone. But on a parent’s back, they gain a vantage, a refuge, and mobility—ferried across the wetland on a feathered ark.

It’s a behavior shared with other grebes, but in the red-necked grebe—found nesting from the boreal margins of Alaska to the northern Great Plains—this chick-riding takes on symbolic weight. These are birds of hidden wetlands, of places that rarely make maps or headlines. Their lives unfold in lily-choked ponds and muskeg backwaters, in landscapes more defined by stillness than spectacle. And yet, their intimacy—carving out family from a floating nest of stems and mud—is a story of resilience in the raw.

Boreal wetlands like the one I sat in that morning are far more than breeding habitat for a few secretive waterbirds. They are among the most biologically and climatically important ecosystems on the planet. Stretching across the northern latitudes like a green crown, the boreal biome holds more freshwater wetlands than anywhere else on Earth. These are carbon-rich landscapes—peatlands, muskeg, and permafrost bogs—that quietly sequester vast amounts of carbon dioxide, playing an outsized role in regulating the planet’s climate.

They are also vital nurseries. More than half of North America’s migratory birds rely on the boreal forest for breeding. Warblers, scaup, loons, cranes—all rise from these waters each summer, born of tangled sedges and still ponds. Yet these wetlands are vulnerable. Logging, mining, and climate disruption threaten to chip away at their edges. Water levels shift. Nesting sites vanish. And the quiet corners that grebes require grow harder to find.

So, when I watched that red-necked grebe ferry its chick across the mirrored surface of a boreal pond, it wasn’t just a moment of parenting. It was an act made possible by one of the last intact wilderness systems left in the Northern Hemisphere.

Photographing red-necked grebes requires more than a long lens. It demands immersion—literal and otherwise. The floating blind I use is little more than a camouflage tent strapped to a flotation frame, designed to bring me to eye-level with wildlife while reducing my presence to a drifting shadow. It’s slow, awkward, and often miserable. But it allows for intimacy without disturbance, which is the only kind of intimacy that matters in wildlife photography.

Grebes are sensitive birds. The wrong movement, a careless silhouette, and they’ll vanish into the reeds. But over time—hours, days, even weeks—they learn the blind. Or rather, they learn it’s not a threat. And once that happens, the real behavior begins. The quiet moments. The gentle exchanges. The passage of a chick from one back to another, like a baton in an invisible relay. The way the parent dips beneath the surface, returning seconds later with a wriggling minnow, held out like an offering of survival.

These are scenes impossible to experience from shore. They require proximity, patience, and above all, respect. Floating blinds teach a kind of humility—because in their silence, you realize how antithetical our lives have become. You realize how much of nature we miss, not because it isn’t there but because we fail to simply immerse ourselves in it, to allow ourselves to be apart of it.

In the frame I chose for this story, the chick is riding high. The light is soft, warm, and low; casting both bird and chick into perfect reflection on the glassy water. The boreal forest looms in the background, casting soft hues of green upon the water where clouds of balsam poplar seeds drift like so many snowflakes with this family of grebes. It’s not a dramatic photo. There’s no action. No bears hunting salmon. No trials of life. But there is connection; a line between parent and child, between wetland and witness, between subject and story. And maybe that’s what draws me back to these grebes. Not just for the photography, but for the place. For the fragility of it all, and the breath-holding stillness of the boreal forest.