As Bald As A Coot

Bold in appearance and once an annual target, the coot is not wholly innocent nor without value within the waterfowl community, finds Ian Morton

WHEN disturbed by a passer-by on stream or pond, they clatter noisily to reed cover, half airborne on lobed claw feet, leaving Leander eddies. However, when threatened on open water by traditional raptor enemies, they take collective action —a strategy first recorded in the mid 17th century by scientist and naturalist Sir Thomas Browne, who had ‘seen them unite from all parts of the shoare in strange numbers when, if a kite stoopes near them, they will fling up and spread such a flash of water with their wings that they will endanger the kite’.

Two hundred years later, natural historian Lord Lilford witnessed the same tactic against a white-tailed eagle ‘so thoroughly drenched that it had great difficulty in flapping along to a tree at not more than 100 yards from the point of attack’. To observe such an event must be a privilege and it would seem that the coot, collectively a cover or covert, is not always the plump and dowdy individual that bobs placidly about on inland water.

Furthermore, its presence can benefit all waterfowl, according to Howard Saunders, who noted in his Illustrated Manual of British Birds of 1889 how large flocks of wintering coot would not only co-operate to drive off avian predators by throwing up water, but were also ‘at times remarkably wary, for which reason their company is much sought by waterfowl, as they give the alarm by day when many of the latter are asleep’.

Shooting mentor and diarist Col Peter Hawker went further. ‘If a gentleman wishes to have plenty of wildfowl on his pond, let him preserve the coots, and keep no tame swans.’