Colours of Wildlife: Red-Knobbed Coot
Created | Updated Jun 14, 2020
Red-Knobbed Coot
Willem is a wildlife artist based in South Africa. He says "My aim is simply to express the beauty and wonder that is in Nature, and to heighten people's appreciation of plants, animals and the wilderness. Not everything I paint is African! Though I've never been there, I'm also fascinated by Asia and I've done paintings of Asian rhinos and birds as well. I may in future do some of European, Australian and American species too. I'm fascinated by wild things from all over the world! I mainly paint in watercolours. . . but actually many media including 'digital' paintings with the computer!"
Today I'm featuring another favourite bird of mine, a Red-Knobbed Coot, Fulica cristata. This is the common coot species in sub-Saharan Africa, and it also occurs in Morocco and southern Spain. In South Africa, it is one of the most abundant waterbirds, occurring almost everywhere there's open water. Nevertheless, it is vulnerable to water pollution, and has decreased in my home town of Polokwane as a result of the deteriorating water quality in our local bird sanctuary.
Cute Coots
Coots were probably the first wild birds I noted seeing. I was interested in all living things from a very early age. In Pretoria, where I was born and spent my first years of life, there is a place called the Austin Roberts Bird Sanctuary, and my father took me there a few times. The sanctuary features tame blue cranes and a hide beside a pond from which to watch waterbirds. I remember being disappointed because there were not large numbers of many different kinds of birds, but the birds I did see were mainly coots. I remember them noisily running along the water surface, a typical coot behaviour.
Today I still have a fondness for coots. They have a very cuddly appearance, with dense, soft, velvety, sooty-grey plumage. I'd love to have a tame one to pet … not to own or keep, just to have around, for instance perhaps at a breeding or rehab centre. They're plump birds, reaching 44 cm/17.5" in length, and a bit over a kg/2 lbs in weight. This species has two round red knobs at the top of its white facial shield, distinguishing it from the Common Coot, which only occurs north of the equator in Africa. The red knobs enlarge during the breeding season, and certainly make the birds seem handsome to each other.
Not visible in my painting, and also often not visible in the wild, are the feet of the coot. The legs are short but strong, and the toes long. They are fringed with flat, fleshy lobes, which work like fins to propel the bird when swimming, as well as enabling them to run on the water to gain speed for lift-off. Coots fly well and can colonize distant new water bodies. Like ducks, they moult their flight feathers all at once so that they spend several weeks each year in a flightless condition, spending the time on the open water in large groups for safety. When swimming, the body floats lightly on top of the water surface. Coots are mainly vegetarian, feeding on a variety of aquatic plants. They dive under the water to get at deep stems and tubers, down to a depth of 6.5 m/22'. They also ingest a few small aquatic critters such as snails or insect larvae. Occasionally they will walk around on the banks of the river or lake, grazing and feeding on soft plants. Their stout bills have sharp edges to shear off leaves. Coots are noisy, and their hoarse hoots, grunts and clucks are typical sounds of African wetlands.
In South Africa, coots can breed at any time of the year. They form pair bonds, occupying well-defended breeding territories. The nest is a platform of stems and leaves of reeds and other water plants, usually anchored to the bottom of the pond or to submerged vegetation. Both sexes incubate the three to eleven eggs. Baby coots are funny looking, with naked skin on their heads coloured blue and red, and yellow down on their necks. They hatch open-eyed and able to move around and swim. They stay in the nest for safety for just a day or so, and then swim with their parents. In some cases, young coots from previous years help their parents to tend the new chicks. The brood is divided between the parents and/or the helpers, so that each chick gets a good deal of attention.
Cantankerous Coots
Why are eccentric, stubborn old-ish men called 'old coots'? Well, it may have something to do with the aggressive behaviour of territorial male coots. They fight by raising up out of the water and pecking at each other, as well as chasing each other over the water surface. But actually, they're not really much more aggressive than many other territorial species.
Coots in Context
Coots are not at all closely related to ducks. They're the most aquatic members of the Rallidae, the Rail family, which includes also crakes, moorhens and swamphens, gallinules, and sometimes flufftails. The majority of coot species occur in the New World, especially South America, and they may have colonized Eurasia and Africa only comparatively recently. The rail family as a whole is remarkable for how its members managed to colonize almost every oceanic island in the world, including extremely remote ones. On many such islands, they subsequently became flightless. Sadly, when humans reached these islands, they brought along with them many other animals including rats, pigs, mongooses and sometimes cats, which promptly set to eating the flightless rails and their eggs, and a very large number of rail species went extinct as a result, especially in the islands of the Pacific Ocean. One flightless coot species, which occurred on Mauritius (same as the dodo) went extinct also. Many flightless rail species still survive, including the Giant Coot of South America, the adults of which are too heavy to fly. The red-knobbed coot, at least, still survives in large numbers and is not at all threatened.
