Many an outdoorsman or woman, be they hunter, angler or birdwatcher, has at one time or another come upon a marsh slough or marshy-edged lakeshore, and surprised a flock of slate-gray, duck-like birds into running, splashing flight. Often, this explosion is preceded by chicken-like warning clucks and chuckles, but if it isn't, it’s apt to scare the hip boots off you when they suddenly patter into ungainly flight culminating in a sliding, splashing landing a safe distance away.

     The coot is a common sight in Atlantic coastal marshes, shallow ponds and bogs where reeds, rushes, and cattails grow. This comical "clown of the marsh" is a dark, slate-gray, rounded-bodied bird with a smallish black head that "bobs" as it swims. Its bill is white or cream colored, it has white undertail coverts, and its legs and feet are greenish. Young birds are similar but duller, more brownish and lighter on their undersides. They measure 13 to 16 inches.

     The toes of the coot are lobed, not webbed. This enables it to swim or dive, as well as walk about through thick marsh foliage. It is as much at home swimming, diving, or tippling as ducks. While it is a strong diver, it is so buoyant that it pops up like a beach ball when it surfaces! Its toes are also equipped with sharp, powerful claws on which it relies in fights with other coots for nesting territory.

     In order to become airborne, the coot must run over the water to gain speed and lift. At first its flight appears a bit laborious, but once it gets going, its flight is rather swift and sure. When a flock is startled, it scatters with a roar of splashing feet and wildly fluttering wings, flying in all directions with big feet dangling.

     A bird that is frequently confused with the coot is the common gallinule, now known as the moorhen. Another bird, the purple gallinule, ranges mostly south of Virginia. The European coot has a facial plate like the gallinule but it's white. They all look like clowns with big noses! The most obvious difference between the two Virginia species is the red bill and facial plate of the common gallinule/moorhen, while the coot's is white. The moorhen has a line of white extending from its flanks along its side as well as an inverted white vee on its undertail coverts. Its feet are not webbed, nor lobed. All these birds are placed in the rail family by ornithologists.

     Coots leave their wintering grounds along coastal, fresh water marshes in early March and head for their breeding marshes in the northern tier of states and Canada. If we could follow them, we'd see them in large rafts, bobbing on the waves of Midwestern lakes like the western shore of Lake Erie, Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin and a host of other lakes and marshes. Sometimes the lakes are still covered with rotting ice flows and the coots sit on them resting and preening, looking especially dark and healthy. Many will nest in the Great Lakes region, and the Dakota prairies, but the majority will go to Canadian prairie sloughs.

     Large and small marshes alike resound with the constant clucking, screeching, babbling, squawking, and other grating noises accompanied by much fighting, splashing,and fussing. They often splash about even when in hiding and its thought that they do so to scare off intruders. I have walked into a quiet marsh and been startled by the sudden splashing and clucking, so maybe it works!

     Coots tend to breed close together in marsh sloughs. Their nests are large structures of dead and decaying stems of marsh vegetation, woven together and piled up with a bowl or cup shaped hollow in the center. All this is built atop a floating platform of dead vegetation and attached to growing plants to stabilize it. Normally, it is well-hidden, but occasionally one is built on the edge of a stand of vegetation with little or no concealment.
Seven to 16 eggs are laid. They are pinkish buff in color, thickly but finely spotted with darker colors. The downy black and reddish chicks hatch one by one, often leaving the nest before all eggs are hatched. It's not unusual for early hatching young to swim off with another female and her young. This probably accounts for the fact that a female may have young of varying sizes and development in her brood.

     Coots feed on a variety of aquatic plants as well as some terrestrial plants. They are said to be especially fond of musk grass. They also eat a wide variety of aquatic animal matter such as snails, insects and worms. Coots also like wild celery, or valesneria grass. This is why you will often see widgeon and gadwall sitting amid rafting, feeding coots. They can't dive like the coot, so they wait for the coots to surface with a morsel of wild celery and grab it from them as they come up. For this reason, many old-time hunter decoy sets contained a good number of coot decoys as "confidence decoys" to entice favored ducks into shotgun range.

     With the coming of fall, coots begin to gather again in large rafts on bigger lakes and marshes. It is a very unsuspicious bird and is easily decoyed and hunted all along its migrational routes. Many stop, or used to, on western Lake Erie near Toledo, Ohio. The AAA baseball team there has the nickname Mudhens, which is a common local name for the coot in the Midwest. They are also called sea crow, water hen, water chicken, marsh chicken, puldoo, or blue peter. Blue peter is the common name around Back Bay. While the coot is not noted table fare, locals in the Back Bay area often favor them over ducks!

     This coot should not be confused with the "sea coot," which is an all encompassing name for the sea ducks known as scoters—surf, white-winged, and black—which are seen mainly on salt water along the coast.
There was a time that I could say they were very prolific, but it seems that we don't see the large rafts of birds we used to. Back Bay and Currituck Sound used to have big flocks, probably because of the heavy growths of water milfoil on which they fed. I can remember driving the causeway between Back Bay and MacKay Island National Wildlife Refuge and seeing thousands of them feeding in the ditches alongside the road. In 1975 an outbreak of avian cholera caused the death of many birds and it was about that time that the milfoil died off. 

     That could be why their numbers dropped in this region. 

     Beginning in late September and especially in October, start looking for this chicken-like bird of the marsh. In recent years, it seems as if they are showing up in larger numbers again. Hopefully, the clucking, squawking sounds of feeding coots—the clown of the marsh—will again be heard in greater numbers on the Chesapeake Bay and the freshwater lakes and marshes nearby.