Remember that Sunday a couple of weeks ago when it was 83 degrees – two days before it snowed?
Well, I had had family members at three different hospitals that week, and one was still in, so although I NEEDED to get outside for a while, I was too frazzled and worn for hiking or anything very demanding. So instead I went bird watching in Hammondsport.
There are two places in Hammondsport to see water birds… Champlin Beach, and the village waterfront. I started out at the Beach, right on Route 54. First off, I was disappointed that the pair of trumpeter swans were nowhere to be seen. But I consoled myself.
There didn’t seem to be much around that was very interesting, which illustrated what’s probably the best rule of nature watching – keep on looking. So I watched the Canada geese for a spell, and the mallard ducks – lovely birds both, bur pretty commonplace around here. I listened to the starlings singing. Yes, they sing, and their song is beautiful. They just throw in a grawk now and then to remind you that they’re starlings. I also spent some time watching and listening to a robin sing. His “cheeriup” heralds ever-returning spring, and he hopped from ground to rock to stump like he was stage-managing the season himself. Beautiful bird, and the first one many children learn.
By then I had worked my way over by the old boat dock, and here I was rewarded by a close look at a raft of American coots. A coot is cute. It’s a fat little black bird with a white front on its bill and between the eyes. They usually travel in small flocks, and they’re diving birds. They submerge completely to grub up food, and they’re in no hurry to come back up.
I’d seen the coots hanging around as I worked along the shore, but in passing the dock I got a good surprise – several pairs of common mergansers. In coots and geese the sexes look alike, but mallards and mergansers can be identified male or female from a distance… the male merganser has a striking whitish body and dark head, while the female has a small crest. Mergansers are diving birds like coots, but they’ve got serrated bills, almost like proto-teeth.
Feeling that I was doing pretty well for the afternoon, I left the park and drove over to the waterfront. While there had been twenty or thirty coots and six or eight mergansers, I now found more coots (off to the right, away from the waterfront itself), five or six pied-billed grebes, and, down off the mouth of the flume, a common loon.
Now, loons and grebes are – guess what? – diving birds. So is the bufflehead, of which I saw a single immature paddling around by the boardwalk.
This got me to thinking. Why were five types of divers hanging around the shore in Hammondsport? Obviously they’d prefer shallow water, but what were they up to down there out of sight? Were they all after the same thing? Or did they all fill different ecological niches in the same space?
So, just for starters… coots, with their lobed feet (rather than full webs) will eat almost anything, but they really go for underwater plants, such as algae, duckweed, milfoil, cattails – you name it, really. Mergansers, on the other hand, mostly take small fish, putting those serrated bills to work. So coots and mergansers can hang out side by side (just as I’d seen) without actually competing.
Grebes, like coots, have lobed feet, but unlike coots, they go for fish. This helps explain why you often see a grebe simply disappear, then come up again a minute or two later a good distance away.
The loon too is a fish-eater, with projections or barbs on the tongue and the roof of the mouth to help along, while the bufflehead dives down to find invertebrates.
So… I’d seen coots AWAY from the swimming areas at both locations. That made sense. They want plants, and that’s where the plants are still allowed to grow. The nearby mergansers could peacefully hunt the same space for fish.
The grebes, the loon, and the bufflehead were all in the plant-barren swimming area, but in shallow water where it would be relatively easy to spot small fish or invertebrates. And they were present IN SMALL NUMBERS, which probably reflected the amount of prey available in the swimming area.
As loons drift along, they ride so low in the water that they look as though they’re sinking. Suddenly a loon will put its head into the water and go down after it. Some people have suggested that loons are an ancient evolutionary development, as their feet are set so far back that they’re scarcely any use on land. Nesting is just about the only reason loons go ashore, spending the rest of their life on (or under) the water.
Grebes, as we’ve mentioned, just sort of disappear. I never really see one go – they just seem there and gone, as though a shark has snatched them from underneath. The cute coot pulls a neat little stunt, jumping upward out of the water, pulling a 180, and diving down nose first. Both the upward and the forward movement are just about the length of the coot’s body. It’s a hard maneuver to catch, as you never know which one’s about to dive, but lots of fun to watch when you see it.
So, five different diving birds in an hour along those shallow waters, not to mention gulls, geese, duck, swallows, starlings, robins, and crows. A nice way to spend some time, and the occasion for an interesting little research project.