Cootless in Seattle

During the springs of 1996 and 1997, the inhabitants of Seattle suffered through two consecutive climatic annoyances: March lasted without pause from the end of February until early June, to wit, our usual early spring weather pattern of gray skies, breezy, wet, highs in the mid-40s, no sun, no blue sky - continued unabated for more than three months. Just the thing to send all those immigrants from LA scrambling for a rope and looking for a branch.

But there was a downside to it, too. In the shallow fresh-water marshes near the University of Washington, the lily pads, which in a normal year break the water's surface by mid-April, did not appear until well into June. (The absence of lily pads actually made it easier to catch turtles, but that's another story.)

The coot, a drab and boringly common waterbird to most, usually constructs its nest in midsummer using primarily, at least locally, lily pad stems of a certain age and, presumably, suppleness. But during those two summers, with the lily pads growing in later than usual, no coot nests were built in the marshes. My guess is that by the time the coots' preferred building material had matured to its usable state it was almost September, and the days were too short, so the coots simply didn't nest.

I became aware of this because canoe excursions to find baby coots (cootlets? cootlings?...) have long been one of the high points of my summers. Yes, I often do hear that I need to get a life. But these cootlets look like Muppet versions of baby birds: a fringe of scraggly long feathers poking out of black down, a bald pinkish-gray head with a halo of wispy gray feathers, and a bright red beak. Along with long-toed gray feet that grow much faster than the rest of the bird. I find them so homely that they're adorable.

But two summers in a row produced no new coots locally. So, by the spring of '98, all we had left was a bunch of old coots. Walked right into that one, didn't you? But seriously, folks, all this resulted in some kind of reproductive bottleneck for local coot populations. The summer of '98 showed up on schedule, however. The lily pads grew in by mid-April, matured on schedule, and by July we were up to our keisters in these tiny old men in clown suits. Local coot populations appear to be on the rebound.

Long-range weather projections for this la Nina year have forecast another long cool gray spring. What will this mean for the coots?

Stay tuned.

Dave McBee plies the waters of Lake Union almost every day in a sculling boat. He looks forward to the season that brings God's Little Squeaky Toys., and expanding his horizons to rafts, canoes and water that moves.