Cold Hike; Cute Coots

Today I celebrated the veering off to the east of a major snowstorm by enjoying a short hike at the Celery Farm Natural Area. If I were a serious birder, interested in making a long list of species observed, this would have been a disappointing walk. I scared up a few chickadees, a catbird and some unidentified sparrows in my walk half-way around the lake. There was also a small flock of gulls and a hunched up, unhappy looking great blue heron on the iced-up lake. Mostly, I spent time enjoying a flock of a dozen or so American Coots, which were concentrated in a small area of open water. It gave me the opportunity to see these rather unusual duck-like, yet not duck-like birds closer than usual. We usually see them floating; today I got to see a couple standing on the ice, revealing their outsized green feet with their unusual lobed toes, which you may be able to see in the photo.

This adaptation seems like a good compromise between fully webbed feet, which may somewhat inhibit walking on land, (one reason why ducks waddle and say “ouch, ouch”—the translation of “quack quack”) and the non-webbed feet of the coot’s cousins, the gallinules and moorhens. Having long toes enables those birds to walk where others fear to tread, such as on lily pads, but probably makes them non-competitive swimmers. Long, lobed toes offer a wide platform for standing and walking and enough toe surface area for paddling. So all-in-all, the coots are well-designed tubby little floaters. And I thank their Designer for giving me the chance to see and photograph a group of them up-close and personal today. Soli Deo Gloria

p.s. I hope you enjoyed this non-controversial post. Writing it gave me relief from thinking of all the dead bears out there, as this was the second day of New Jersey's controversial bear hunt.