Phil’s Photo Monday, American Coot

 

Cool Facts

Although it swims like a duck, the American Coot does not have webbed feet like a duck. Instead, each one of the coot’s long toes has broad lobes of skin that help it kick through the water. The broad lobes fold back each time the bird lifts its foot, so it doesn’t impede walking on dry land, though it supports the bird’s weight on mucky ground.

American Coots in the winter can be found in rafts of mixed waterfowl and in groups numbering up to several thousand individuals.

The ecological impact of common animals, like this ubiquitous water bird, can be impressive when you add it all up. One estimate from Back Bay, Virginia, suggested that the local coot population ate 216 tons (in dry weight) of vegetation per winter.

The oldest known American Coot lived to be at least 22 years 4 months old.

Habitat

Lake/Pond

The American Coot inhabits a wide variety of freshwater wetlands from prairie potholes to swamps and marshes to suburban park and sewage ponds to the edges of large lakes. Two features generally characterize all bodies of water where coots breed: (1) heavy stands of emergent aquatic vegetation along at least some portion of the shoreline and (2) at least some depth of standing water within those stands of vegetation. Seasonal wetlands used during years of high water, while drought years cause breeding to be limited to permanent wetlands.

Food

Plants

Eats mainly aquatic plants including algae, duckweed, eelgrass, wild rice, sedges, hydrilla, wild celery, waterlilies, cattails, water milfoil; when on land they also pick at terrestrial plants and sometimes eat grains or leaves of oak, elm, and cypress trees. They’re not exclusively vegetarian. You may also see them eating insects (beetles, dragonflies, and others), crustaceans, snails, and small vertebrates such as tadpoles and salamanders.

Nesting

Nesting Facts

Clutch Size

8–12 eggs

Number of Broods

1-2 broods

Egg Length

1.7–2.2 in

Egg Width

0.8–1.5 in

Incubation Period

23–25 days

Egg Description

Buff, pinkish buff or buff-gray speckled with dark brown, purplish brown, or black.

Condition at Hatching

Covered in down, alert, ready to leave the nest within 6 hours of hatching.

Nest Description

The nest material is woven into a shallow basket with a hollowed interior lined with finer smooth material to hold the eggs. The entire nest is generally a floating structure anchored to upright stalks. Average diameter is 12 inches, with a 12 to 15-inch ramp and an egg cup of about 1 inch in depth and 6 inches in diameter.

Nest Placement

Floating

Nests are almost always built over water on floating platforms and almost always associated with dense stands of living or dead vegetation such as reeds, cattails, bulrushes, sedges, and grasses. Occasionally, the nest may be built on the edge of a stand of vegetation, where it is clearly visible.

Behavior

Surface Dive

A slow and meticulous forager, the American Coot plucks at plants while walking, swimming, dabbling with its head just underwater, or in full dives. In flight coots are clumsy and labored (though less so than Common Moorhens). To get airborne, coots typically have to beat their wings while running across the water for many yards. Coots sometimes gather in winter flocks of several thousand, sometimes mixing with other waterfowl. They sometimes steal food from others including ducks. Coots sometimes lay their eggs in the nests of other coots as well as Franklin’s Gulls, Cinnamon Teal, and Redheads.

Conservation

status via IUCN

Least Concern

Common and widespread. Coot aren’t hunted nearly as much as ducks since many hunters consider them inedible. Some hunters shoot them for sport, particularly in Louisiana, California, Florida, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. In 1999 the annual harvest of coots in the U.S. was about 720,000. Because they live in wetlands, coots can accumulate toxins from pollution sources including agricultural runoff, industrial waste, and nuclear facilities. Because coots are so common and widespread, scientists sometimes monitor them as a way of monitoring these problems in the environment at large.

Source: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/american_Coot/lifehistory