The coots on the twin Waterworks reservoirs were behaving in a dilly, odd way. Chasing each other furiously, coming face to face and then shaking their heads, dunking bills into the water and sending up a spray of droplets.
Suddenly I realised that there was a reason for the madness. Spring was in the air. Although in the dying days of July it was a little early for the season of rejuvenation and romance, the sun strong warm and hard after days of torrential rain.
The strident birdsong and the silver wattles breaking into yellow flower confirmed that the end of winter was approaching.
I don’t usually pay attention to coots, possibly because as a largely universal species they were part of the fabric of birding when I was growing up in Britain. I didn’t come all this way to see coots, I told myself when they first turned up at my stamping ground of the Waterworks about 10 years ago. Just a few at first and soon they were breeding, now producing about 20 young each year.
I shouldn’t dismiss coots as a birding species of interest. Although members of the rail family – Rallidae – they have forsaken a life on land for the water. At first sight they look more like ducks but are easily distinguished by their rounded, sooty-black bodies, white frontal mask, and straight, not flattened beaks. Their feet are partially webbed and set well back on the body. Out of water they are ungainly. Once afloat, though, they are great divers, plunging underwater for plant and insect life.
On the day I watched them at the Waterworks, they were eschewing feeding for the mad antics of spring – indulging in courtship rituals, male and female facing each other and bobbing heads, more like the breeding behaviour of another family of birds found on water, the grebes.
The coots are certainly an oddity and it is difficult to believe they are cousins of another common rail found in Tasmania, the Tasmanian native-hen. They couldn’t be more different. The native-hen is flightless, and is unique among birds in its mating habits. The females of the species do not form traditional family units. They run harems of young males who ultimately help them rear offspring of several broods.
Not so the coots. Male and female pairs can be seen throughout spring and summer on nests of sticks and reeds anchored at the shoreline of the reservoirs.
The young are brooded by the female for the first three to four days during which time food is brought by the male. The male also builds several more platforms, back-up nests if one gets flooded, and for roosting. Such is the devotion of both parents, the brood is sometimes split up on leaving the nest with each parent taking care of a separate group.