American coots don’t deserve their crotchety moniker
I’ve often wondered how the name of a waterbird — the American coot — became the pejorative “old coot” for a crotchety old man.
But while watching rafts of coots recently at the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, I had a burst of insight. The birds utter raspy, crotchety-like vocalizations, sounding like “burr-it, burr-it, poo-uk, poo-uk, nee-nee-nee-nee.”
With their bulging midsections and dowdy, sooty-colored plumage, coots don’t usually win people’s hearts and minds. Even birders often give the bird only a passing glance.
What grabs attention is the offwhite shield on a coot’s forehead merging with a concolorous beak that has a smudgy red ring near the tip. A reddish spot on the shield between the eye adds a bit of luster to an otherwise lusterless bird.
The birds find homes in all sorts of wetlands, from reed- covered coastal marshes to lakes, parkland ponds, waste-water treatment ponds and the occasional saltwater bay. They
live throughout most of North America plus Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
Coots from northern regions migrate to local wetlands for the winter, creating a surge in coot populations. They float in congeries looking like black mats on water otherwise dotted with attractive migratory ducks, such as green-winged teal and American widgeons.
But unlike male ducks that are brazenly polygamous, male coots are faithfully monogamous. And the males are intensely aggressive — call it quarrelsome — in warding off intruders from their nesting site, even if the intruder is another male coot.
American coots are members of the Rallidae bird family, which includes king and clapper rails that are common, albeit secretive, birds of coastal marshes. The family kinship isn’t apparent because rails look skinny and coots look fat. But a coot can flatten the vertical shape of its body to slip into dense vegetation the way a rail does.
Wish those of us with belly fat could flatten our profiles.
Other birds in the Rallidae family include common gallinules, aka marsh hens, with bright red beaks, swimming like ducks among the coots. Despite their uninspiring plumage of slate gray and olive-brown, they present a startling contrast to coot plumage.
But coots are no fools, despite their frumpy appearance. When a predator, such as an alligator, sneaks up, they’ll race off with feet pattering on top of the water or fly away just above the surface with heads and necks thrust forward in a zippy escape.