Take swimming, for example. The webbed feet of ducks do an efficient job of propelling them, both above and below the water. In contrast, coots have lobed toes, narrowing at each joint so they can bend them. They swim while pumping their heads backward and forward, a bit like a little kid trying to get his bike to go faster. They can, however, dive and do so often.

Coots also make taking flight look difficult. Like loons, they need a long runway to get airborne, and when they do, they don’t fly far above the water and do so with their head, neck, and legs hanging lower than the body. That said, some populations migrate long distances.

Coots breed throughout the North America west of the Mississippi with their breeding territory extending eastward through the Great Lakes and up the St. Lawrence Valley to the western edge of Québec. Populations in western Canada and the upper Midwest are migratory. Those from the Rockies westward and south of Missouri and Oklahoma are largely resident. Coots winter in the southeast U.S., but they are reported to be lingering to breed there as well.

But to return to their appearance, their relatedness to the rails is most clearly seen in the shape of a coot’s bill. The entire bird is the size of the larger rails (~15 inches), but its bill is shorter, more like that of the smaller rails. It has, however, a frontal plate that extends from the bill up toward the crown. A coot’s bill is bone white outside the breeding season with a small dark ring near the tip. Out of the water coots have the same chicken-like (or guinea fowl-like) proportions as a rail but with shorter legs.

The related gallinules are the other “swimming rails.” They, like coots, have a frontal plate that extends upward from the bill, but both the beak and the plate are red in the common gallinule (Gallinula galeata), while the purple gallinule (Porphyrula martinica) the bill is red and the plate is pale blue. While the gallinules swim, they do even less efficiently than the coot, as their toes lack lobing, never mind webbing. They are, however, more prone to wading like other rails and have correspondingly longer legs to do so.

If you own David Sibley’s Guide to Birds (2000) you will notice that common gallinule is called the “common moorhen” (Gallinula chloropus). This temporary taxonomic conflation was reversed less than 10 years after Sibley published his guide. Although they resemble one another, the vocalizations of the Old and New World populations are different. According to Alvaro Jaramillo (LSU): What appears to be the primary vocalization in the New World population is a rich nasal ‘laughter,’ while the homologous call in the Old World populations is a rather short, simple quavering note lasting less than half a second ‘kruuuk’.”

In addition, while trying to establish the ancestry of the flightless gallinules of islands in the tropical mid Atlantic, Dick Groenberg and others (2008) analyzed the DNA of several gallinule subspecies. Chloropus and galeata subspecies sorted separately.

While Fulica atra, the Eurasian coot, very much resembles the American coot, no recent molecular studies have been conducted to sort out coot relatedness. Charles Sibley, a pioneer of DNA analysis in birds (and not related to David Sibley), asserted in 1990 that americana was more closely related to atra than to some of the South American species. All Fulica taxa are plain gray birds with different frontal plate (“shield”) colors and shapes and varying amounts and distributions of white on their flight feathers.

There are 11 members of the Fulica genus. The species endemic to the Mascarene (Reunion, Mauritius) islands is extinct. The Hawaiian coot is extant. All the rest of the diversity, excepting the American and Eurasian species, is in South America. Until recently a 12th taxon with a red frontal plate was recognized in the Caribbean, but it was found to interbreed freely with F. americana, and now red and white shielded birds in the Caribbean are treated as color morphotypes of the same species.

Coots are not common in New Hampshire. If you would like to see larger numbers of them, visit Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge in Seneca Falls, N.Y. where they are regular breeders and congregate during migration. Montezuma is a vast wetland through which Seneca Lake, one of the largest Finger Lakes, drains north toward Lake Ontario. It is a wonderful place to see migratory birds from central Canada that rarely come this far east—swans, blue and snow geese … coots—and it is only, um, 6 hours from here by car. OK, so it isn’t a day trip, but it is well worth it.

– Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher for over 50 years. These columns are archived at shinhollow.wordpress.com.