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American Coot | Fulica americana
Amerikaanse meerkoet | Gallareta americana
American Coot is the slate-grey waterbird with the white bill that floats in flocks of thousands on open water across the continent in winter. It swims like a duck but belongs with the rails, and instead of webbed feet it has toes edged with broad lobes that fold open and shut with every stroke. Those feet only become clear when the bird walks out onto a lawn.
Voice
A flock of coots is audible all day: short hard kuk notes, a nasal poonk, brief croaks and a run of dry, clucking puhlk sounds. The calls shift with the situation — higher and faster in disputes, lower and slower when the flock is keeping contact. Both sexes call, and in winter flocks the calling carries on through the night. Chicks beg with a high bleating squeal right beside the parent.
Recording: Max Noack — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · San Cristobal Verapaz, San Cristóbal Verapaz, Alta Verapaz Department, Guatemala · xeno-canto
Identification
A stocky, slate-grey to blackish bird with a black head and neck, a small white shield on the forehead and a thick white bill with a dark red band just behind the tip. The eye is red; under the tail a white patch shows when the bird dives and in display. The legs are yellow-green, with long toes edged by broad lobes rather than webs. Juveniles are paler and greyer with a dull white bill lacking the red; downy chicks have orange down around the head and bare red skin on the crown. Swimming, the head pumps with every stroke; to get airborne it runs a long way across the surface with beating wings, and in flight the white trailing edge of the wing shows.
Confusion species
Hawaiian Coot is the only other coot on the islands: it is slightly smaller and has a much larger, bulging white shield that carries up over the crown, without the dark red band behind the bill tip. Common Gallinule (Gallinula galeata) lives in the same marshes but has a red shield, a red bill with a yellow tip and a white line along the flank. Diving ducks on the same water have a flattened bill, webbed feet and a smooth swimming action with no head pumping, and they dive without the little forward leap a coot almost always makes. At long range a winter raft is recognisable by the uniformly dark bodies with the row of white bill tips among them.
Habitat
It breeds in shallow freshwater marshes with reeds, cattail or bulrush, anchoring a floating nest among the stems; it needs both cover to nest in and open water to feed on. Outside the breeding season it trades those marshes for larger, more open water: lakes, reservoirs, quiet river backwaters, saltwater lagoons and brackish bays. It also grazes out of the water, on lawns, golf courses, parks and pasture right along the shore. Fast-flowing water and deep water without aquatic plants offer it nothing.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by the USNVC — the vegetation classification of the United States and Canada — and CMECS for sea and coast.
Range and movements
It breeds from southern Canada and the prairies south through the United States, Mexico and the highlands of Central America into the Caribbean; across the southern part of that range it stays all year. Birds from the north and the interior leave as soon as their waters freeze and winter in the southern states, along both coasts, in Mexico and in the Antilles. The building of reservoirs, fish ponds and treatment wetlands during the twentieth century gave the species many new breeding and wintering sites in the west. In Hawaii it turns up now and then as a vagrant.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
In winter look on any large open water: coots pack tightly into rafts and give themselves away at a distance by the pumping of their heads. Then watch the shore — a coot grazing on grass shows its lobed toes, and that is the best moment to see where it parts company with a duck. In disputes two birds run at each other across the water with tails raised and then rock back to strike with their feet; this goes on all winter.
Conservation
Numerous, with a population of several million, and not threatened (LC). It is a game species in a number of states, though little shot. The main pressure comes from the loss of shallow freshwater marsh to drainage and shoreline development; on some waters lead from old shot and mercury build up in the aquatic plants it feeds on.
Scientific name
Fulica americana | Gmelin, 1789
Gmelin described the species in 1789 as Fulica americana, in the thirteenth edition of Linnaeus's Systema Naturae; it still stands in that genus, so author and year carry no parentheses. Fulica is the classical Latin word for a coot, probably related to fuligo ('soot'), after the dark plumage. americana separates it from the European species. The type locality is given as North America, with no more precise place.