Though 50 years ago in Kentucky I also saw lots of coots, coot numbers in the refuge were so impressive that I wondered whether maybe coot populations have been expanding at the expense of duck species. Maybe one reason coots are so successful is that they eat a large variety of submerged vegetation. A coot would dive briefly and come up with a mass of green, stringy vegetation several inches long, which might take a fair amount of time to swallow -- especially when other coots tried to snatch it from the diver's beak. There was so much submerged food easily available that it seemed to me coots tried to snatch food from their neighbors more for the fun of it than for the diving work they could have saved themselves.

Despite coots looking like ducks at a distance, coots aren't ducks. Ducks belong to the Waterfowl Order, the Anseriformes, containing not only ducks but also geese, swans and other ducky species. Coots are members of the Crane Order, the Gruiformes, holding cranes, rails and limpkins. Instead of having completely webbed feet like ducks, coot feet bear "scalloped" toes -- the toes' sides bearing skin flaps that fold behind the toes when the foot is passing forward through the water, but which flair out pushing against the water when the foot is moving backward. Also, instead of having flat beaks like ducks, you can see that coot beaks are higher than flatter.

In the second picture above a flock of coots is taking off from the water and you can see that they don't "jump" from the water like some duck species. Coots seem to have a hard time getting aloft, during part of the takeoff actually running atop the water, splashing noisily and picturesquely. Look at that coot in the lower right to see what a water-top-running coot looks like.

During the summer breeding season coots are found in wetlands throughout the US and southern and western Canada, but during the winter they withdraw from most of Canada and the northern US, except in the Pacific Northwest. Here they occur year round.

As a kid in Kentucky I was taught to call coots Mud Hens. Maybe they got that name by the way they bob their heads back and forth as they walk and swim, just like an old hen in a chicken yard.

I mentioned "a flock of coots" but actually there are more specific words for designating coot gatherings. Groups of coots are called "covers" or "rafts." If you could have seen how black some of the flooded fields were this week with coots, you'd agree that "a cover of coots" makes sense.

from the January 12, 2007 Newsletter, issued from Jalpan, Querétaro, Mexico:
COOTS
The reservoir next to which I camped over the weekend harbored hundreds of American Coots. Blue-winged Teal also populated the lake in smaller numbers.
The two species sometimes mingled and when I saw them together I couldn't keep from philosophizing about their very different living strategies.

For, coots hang out in small, loose flocks, with each bird more or less doing his own thing. In a flock of three, one bird may be diving deeply for food, another may be preening, and the third signaling his mates with head-bobbing and calling while the mates seem to ignore him altogether. The smaller, more elegant-looking Blue-winged Teal, however, stay in tightly constituted flocks of 15-30 or more birds. They're nervously alert and fly away fast if anything looks suspicious. While coots seem content eating any aquatic vegetation they can stuff into their mouths, the teal appear to be more selective, apparently relishing aquatic insects and other invertebrates along with their aquatic-plant diet.

In other words, the two species formed a classic couple -- like the slob and the dandy, the flexible generalist and the finicky specialist, the unfocused liberal and the obsessive conservative. Once again Mother Nature shows that She doesn't favor one manner over the other, but She does insist on diversity.

Sometimes the teal in their methodical foraging uprooted aquatic vegetation that the coots then opportunistically ate. Some coots seemed to hang around the teal just for the free scrounging. Since there was plenty of aquatic vegetation to go around I almost got the notion that the coots were freeloading just for the fun of it!

At dusk when there was hardly any light left a good number of coots drifted into a little inlet near my tent where they roosted. It was too dark for me to see but it sounded as if they climbed onto shrub limbs emerging from the water.

During the night sometimes a coot would erupt into the kind of nasally squeaky, rattling and clucking heard by clicking on one of the audio icons at the page bottom linked to here.

There was a nearly full moon last weekend. What a pleasure lying in my tent with its open-web top while the moonlight flooded in, crickets chimed, frogs croaked, and those good-ol'-boy coots out there whooped it up in the moonlight.