American Coot - Fulica americana

In winter the San Francisco Bay Area hosts many thousands of American Coots, Fulica americana, seen just about anywhere you find a significant collection of water. We see rafts of up to 1,000 on Richardson Bay, for instance. By the end of May many have departed to find secluded marshes to build nesting platforms, but a few remain here to breed (the young have amazing red heads!). This bird was at Las Gallinas in March, and although I don't often photograph Coots (they are difficult subjects for technical reasons) I did like the way the light brought out the red color in the iris and the claret-brown color of the button callus button on the white frontal shield. The also have a black ring near the tip of the bill, sort of like the unrelated Pied-billed Grebe.

The "shield" is an unusual fleshy structure that extends upward from the tissue of the upper mandible to cover a portion of the forehead. Function uncertain, but speculation includes protection, as well as use in individual identification and in breeding display. The shield, and the pigmented button of callus near the top, vary a lot with age and sex and the shape has been used to differentiate individual coots.

Taxonomy:

The Coots are in Gruiformes, a diverse order includes 11 different families of birds.

Family: Railidae - Rails, Gallinules, Coot and Crake - 135-140 species in all.

Other gruiform families (# species) include: Limpkin (1), Cranes (15), Mesites (3), Buttonquail (16), Cranes (15), Trumpeters (3), Finfoots (3), Kagu (1), Sunbittern (1), Seriema (2), and the Bustards (26). Some birders like to try and see all the families of the world (numbering around 230), so the Gruiformes provide them with some good targets.

Genus: Fulica - The Coots, 11 species in all - 9 of them seen in the Americas. Our only Coot is the American Coot, unless you count the Hawaiian Coot, which is indeed a separate species.