counting coots

Let me illustrate this point by discussing the nesting habits of three pairs of Coots. Specifically in the Wandle. I am going give three examples and use words and pictures to elucidate behaviour of said bird in some kind of pseudo-scientific way. You shouldn’t really be surprised by this if you are a regular visitor here. I don’t blame you if you go and find something more interesting to do. For those that wish to persist, here goes!

The three examples of nesting are categorised thus – 'the doomed', 'the doomed but interesting', and the 'once doomed but hopeful'. Stick with it kids, it’ll be over in no time.

The doomed.



Not so long back I showed the folly of a pair of coots that plonked down on the banks of the Thames as the tide exposed a suitable area. Here is another example in the Wandle. It is a different pair, of that I have no doubt (there are about five pairs round here, none of them with a hope in hell of success). This area of the Wandle delta is the closest to the chalk stream that wandle once was, and this area of the riverbed is exposed for no more than a few hours at a time, and the nest site and the collection of material is futile. Don’t mock them, they cannot help it.


The doomed but interesting.


Spotted yesterday on the Wandle. If you look carefully you can see that there is a Coot behind the reeds frantically pulling all the nesting material that it’s mate is bringing it into a rudimentary nest. It’s high tide, and the birds are nesting in a quite suitable area. Now, if this nest were being made by any other waterbird you could reasonably expect success. However, these are Coots. Do you know what the problem is? In an hours time the water level will fall, and the nest will become more distant from the surface of the water. And Coots don’t like this one little bit. It doesn’t bother Moorhens, but Coots have to have the base of their nest touching water. So, it was an interesting proposition, but I doubt if the birds will build a nest from the top down that will be 5 metres tall.  I've seen this pair (or birds holding this section of the river as territory) starting nests on freshly exposed mud at low tide, so it is possible that they are trying to build two nests a day.  Mad.


The once doomed but hopeful.

I've yacked on about Thames21 and their valiant work in trying to keep the Thames clean by having regular collections of litter and detritus from the foreshore.  There are a similar bunch of people who do this on the river Wandle, The Wandle Trust, who are not just litter collectors but do so regularly. 

Having subscribed to an e-mail doodah, over the course of the winter I would be kept up to date with the news regarding the river and also when they were having clear ups at the weekend.  All very worthy, but for me worrying.  When the alerts come through, they would detail the date and time of the get together, and the location  - the stretch of the river that they would be clearing up.  Opening these mails would always cause me some consternation as it is only a matter of time before they clean up my stretch.  And then what?  It's dissapointing that a shopping trolley has been left in the river so many years (not the fault of the Wandle Trust obviously), so I shouldn't cavil at this, and the Coots cannot realistically succeed in their breeding attempts but I couldn't help but object anyway.  But for no good reason.

To answer my question, I've contacted them.  There might be something that can be done.  There might not. 

If you don't ask...

There was a bit of commotion on The Wandle yesterday, Blackbirds, Magpies, Coots all doing alarm calls - loads of gulls circling and calling wildly but I couldn't see what the fuss was.  Until a Pigeon flew across the river with a plastic bag attached to it's foot.  Specifically a Sainsbury's bag (identification is important don't you know).  Unfortunately for the pigeon, plastic bags are not very aerodynamic.  So it landed in the river.

This freaked all the ducks out and they flew off.  Bummer.  The Pigeon then flapped about a bit, trying to take off.  Like this...


This didn't work.  So it decided to flap towards the bank, to give itself a chance of getting dry and not drowning.  Which it did.  Unfortunately the bank on this part of The Wandle is nothing more than silt.  So it got stuck.  And there it sat, exhausted.  It's ulitmate fate involved drowning or perhaps being tea for a Herring Gull or Heron if found.

The Teal numbers are slowly increasing on the Wandle.  Not quite double figures, that is how slow it is increasing.  And occasionally fluctuating.  They are all male, and they are starting to get less nervy.  When they first arrived, they only had to see a human on the spit area and they were off.  Now they just move along the water a bit and continue feeding.

Until yesterday. 

Because yesterday there were females.  Oh yes, two little lady Teal amongst the 7 males.  As you would expect, the males were more than a little excited and starting doing loads of bobbing and whistling while the female would keep teasingly distant from the males as they danced around.  I expect to see more of the same today, but preferably without the wind driving sleet onto my eyeballs.

There was a piece in the paper in the weekend where a bloke of the gardening telly made a funny point about the latin name of a plant, or a shrub or a tree. Anyway the was binomial specific was cockburnianus which produces hoots of laughter in garden centres.

That brings me neatly, perhaps, to the promised Pintails. Possibly the best looking duck going. Possibly the best duck latin name going (Anas acuta). Last winter the Wandle basin didn’t get much Pintail action due to the creation of the Attenuation ponds, which scared them off.  Hopefully this winter will be better, as it is currently not a building site.  Started with a male, increased to two males and a female by mid week, and back down to a single male by Friday.  Hoping to be back to the levels of two winters ago when there would be a dozen or so, kicking about with a fair few Gadwall and a couple of dozen sleeping Tufties.

So there you go, a short post regarding Pintails, and no swearing.

The world infamous shopping trolley Coots. Taken at the end of last week. Although they have managed to find a large pink flower to replace the Nike trainer (houseproud obviously) they have manifestly been unable to raise the height of the nest despite the suitability of the site to do so. Indeed the bird seems to be even lower in the nest site than usual. A visit yesterday found no eggs and nothing sitting.

Exhibit B

Wandle mouth mentalist. This is a bird sitting on a nest that is exposed for no more than two hours a day. Yet it continues to leap on it once exposed, grab some materials to add and then sit tight, while it's mate attacks anything that comes close. Even if it is 10 times bigger than it. About 10 minutes after this photo was taken the tide was up to it's belly.




Brent Res Coot with a bloody skyscraper! Non-tidal water, with just a little bit of structure to hold on to, and the nest is proper high.

In conclusion, with the evidence supplied within, I have no option but to surmise that the Coots on the Wandle are retards.

Yes, they are back. Assumed to be brood two. Much less inclined to move when on the nest so I cannot tell you how many eggs there are. The tides have not been especially high this week, so they may not have been flooded out, but I expect that this is just a temporary situation.

Note in picture two that the nest area has obtained a new addition, in the guise of an upturned trainer. Nike for those that actually care about these things.

This got me thinking about how much detritus I have seen floating down the Wandle (this river was so abused from the time of the industrial revolution that it was declared dead in the sixties - so what I get now is a vast improvement) and in true Generation Game stylee I present you the list. This is just for the Wandle, not the Thames where the list starts to include boats and guns and things. I shit you not.

A used condom

A shoe

A ski

Four car tyres

Beer cans

A filing cabinet, with drawers

Footballs

A shopping trolley (Sainsbury's)

Beer bottles

Tennis balls

A microwave oven

A cuddly toy

A lifebouy

Empty cider bottles

Traffic cones

A pair of gloves

A junkie's hypodermic

Flourescent jackets

A mattress

A colour television.

Give us a twirl Isla, or whatever your name is.

The stupidest thing about this list is that I don't have to make any of it up.

Finally, a big shout out to the London boroughs of Wandsworth, Merton and Croydon for the assistance in making this post happen and fly tipping into the river. I couldn't have done it without you guys!

Coot numbers well up today. Normally on the Wandle there are 6 – that are largely in the territories that were observed last year. But today there were 5 more on the Thames, which is very unusual and my guess is that they are strays that have come in due to the harsh weather. There are, admittedly, more that hang around closer to the park, but these five were a half a mile away and seemed out of place. One of them was ‘clicking’ quite a bit, which is unlike the residents. They may have tried to get onto the quieter waters of the Wandle at some point, but the resident pairs are such a bolshy and stroppy lot that they would have sent them packing quickly. That or they got weirded out by hanging around the horny Gadwalls.

Anyhow, this kind of brings me to explaining the naming of this blog. Last summer, by far the most interesting thing that was happening once the breeding season kicked in was the machinations of the local Coot population. The most interesting were a pair that kept nesting in the same place on the Wandle and kept getting washed out. Although I hate myself for a slip into personification, I casually called them the shopping trolley Coots, as their nest site was literally on an upturned shopping trolley that was stuck in the river, and the resulting detritus that had caught up in it (including a ski). They produced at least three clutches that were methodically destroyed by the highest of the tides. This was repeated on a smaller scale by another pair that hold a territory below the weir, so the tidal nature of their site is the same as the Thames, but when the tide fell they began nest building and sitting on what they could get together over the course of a few hours before it got washed away. And this happened day after day after day… The third pair just fight with everything. Including a wonderfully entertaining lunchtime when it all kicked off … http://www.birdforum.net/showpost.php?p=1197289&postcount=50

The whole situation got me thinking about how good or bad a memory the birds have and whether they have any ‘understanding’ of how tides work – against the drive that they have to reproduce. These questions have yet to be answered fully, and I’m looking forward to the spring and summer to start watching this half dozen mental birds to see what they are up to again. So there, Counting Coots explained, kind of.





Almost predictably, a picture of the nest site from last year...