Pied-billed Grebes in some New Places, on the Tuolumne River and the Willms Road

It's been a whole two weeks since I posted some pictures of a Pied-billed Grebe (Podilymbus podiceps) at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge, and I still think they're the best ones I've gotten so far. This week, though, they've popped up in a couple of other places where I've not seen them before. The first two pictures were taken at the Willms Ranch stock pond, where one was swimming about. It stood out because it didn't spook as easily as all the American Coots. They are not an unusual sight there, as birders report them regularly. But this the first one that I've noticed on that particular body of water. Willms Pond is a couple of miles south of Knights Ferry on Willms Road in the Sierra Nevada foothills

The other sighting was a little bit more unusual, being the first reported on my stretch of the river according to eBird. That's not a great surprise, because the Tuolumne Parkway Trail is new and is only beginning to be visited on a regular basis by the serious birders (as opposed to the casual amateurs like me). They've been seen just downstream by kayakers, but none have been noted for about four or five miles upstream, in the vicinity of Modesto Reservoir and Hawkins Pond. I've seen this small grouping of two to five of them in the smooth stretch of the river just downstream of the stairwell.