A PILE OF COOTS

A Frigid Day at LEMP

By Leonard Weber

January 30, 2008

The temperature this morning was about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. With a strong westerly wind, the wind chill temperature was somewhere in the neighborhood of minus 10. While that is a pretty cold neighborhood to visit, I had a little time set aside for birding and did not want the weather to stop me.

I had planned to go to Lake Erie Metro Park this morning, mostly because I wanted to look for the Long-eared Owls that have been wintering there. Like many other South Eastern Michigan birders, I have come to know LEMP as a very good spot for winter birding. It might be brutal to stand on the shore in this weather, so I probably wouldn’t do much waterfowl viewing today, but at least I could look for the owls in their sheltered roosts. Dressed in several layers, I headed for I 75.

When I arrived at LEMP, I parked so that I could keep the wind on my back as I walked to the spot where I had seen a Long-eared Owl in December. There were three together this time, two on one limb and the other a couple feet higher. As seeing Long-eared Owls is not a common experience for me, today had already turned out to be a good birding day. The Long-eareds were doing as I was doing – they had their backs to the wind. Only one turned its head briefly to watch me watching them.

Soon I walked on, wondering if I would see much bird activity at all, since seeking shelter is what this kind of day is all about. In the protected areas, a limited number of song birds were foraging – Black-capped Chickadees, Cardinals, White-throated Sparrows, Mourning Doves, and American Tree Sparrows. The only small birds I saw out in the open area, where the wind was whistling, were Tree Sparrows. I decided that they are truly winter birds.

As I walked along the shore, still with the wind to my back as much as possible, I began to see what looked like an extensive pile of dark rocks where the shore ice and open water met. A closer, binocular-aided, look revealed that the “rocks” were coots cuddled tightly together. Though I had not seen such coot cuddling before, it seemed to make a lot of sense to me today. I just hope that those on the outside, especially the ones taking the wind on the west side, were able to change places with ones on the inside at some point.

There were also a dozen or more swans scattered on the ice looking more like snow piles – or corpses – than like rocks. Each one was cuddling itself, no group hug here. Like the coots, they moved not at all. I presumed that they were Mute Swans because I was unable to see their heads that were tucked out of sight in their wings.

As I was about to move on, I saw a Bald Eagle come swooping down toward the water. Neither the coots nor the swans reacted at all, exhibiting none of the moves that they usually make when an eagle approaches. They simply stayed in their warm formations. Temperature changes behavior. The eagle flew on.

When I saw a Golden-crowned Kinglet, foraging in its typical energetic behavior, I remembered reading about a naturalist in Maine who had done some research on Golden-crowned Kinglets in winter. He found that several kinglets roost tightly together at night to survive the cold. So I looked for others and was pleased to find them. A kinglet needs companions on a day like this, just as coots do.

I started back to the car. Without anyone to cuddle with out in the open, I decided it was time to seek shelter. As I walked back along the shoreline, several Great Blue Herons flew overhead. A few years ago, I would have been very surprised to see them at this time of the year, thinking that they always went south in the winter. Though I have since learned that some will stay in southern Michigan if they find open water, I have never seen them on this cold of a day. They were flying south along the shore, so maybe they were heading a bit south after all. But seeing them out and about on a day like this