American Coot Gallery

Fulica americana

eBird offers this description for the American Coot:  Plump, chicken-like bird that acts like a duck. Gray overall with blacker head and white bill. Tiny tail and short wings. Feet are large, yellow-green, and oddly lobed. Head jerks back and forth when swimming. Forages for aquatic vegetation anywhere with water: ponds, city parks, marshes, reservoirs, lakes, ditches, and saltmarshes.  All About Birds gives this additional descriptive information about the American Coot:  The waterborne American Coot is one good reminder that not everything that floats is a duck. A close look at a coot—that small head, those scrawny legs—reveals a different kind of bird entirely. Their dark bodies and white faces are common sights in nearly any open water across the continent, and they often mix with ducks. But they’re closer relatives of the gangly Sandhill Crane and the nearly invisible rails than of Mallards or teal.

I am sure that I have seen this bird many times since I have lived at the lake.  But on the morning of November 7, 2020, I watched a photographed a small group of them just off my dock.