Tales From The Woods #5

Working up in the hills as I do, I wasn't expecting to run across a coot. I don't mean "coot", a grizzled old man living in a shack with his shotgun and corn whiskey. That wouldn't surprise me at all. I mean coot as in American Coot. It's a bird common to wetlands, riverways, and so on. Not on ridge tops over 5 miles from any significant body of water.

Yet here it is. It's early April, and I'm not on my usual site. We're short a couple of techs, so everyone's picking up slack, and that means handling a couple sets of traps on another site. And here's this coot, sitting alongside the trail at not even 7 in the morning, matching my stare with those red eyes it has. I wondered if I'm going loopy, but there's work to do, so I went on to my traps.

On the way back, though, the coot is still there. I still had my own site to get to, but this was too strange to ignore. I knelt down for a closer look. The coot leaned back a little, but that's all. I reached out with my hand rake and poked it. I still half-expected it to vanish before my eyes, but the rake makes contact. The bird is really there. In response to the poking, the coot raises up on one leg for a moment, while keeping its other leg tucked beneath it, but it didn't flee. It kept watching me steadily the whole time.

It was kind of hypnotic, but I remembered I had work to do. Out comes the camera (which I actually remembered to bring for once) and snapped a few pictures. It's so rare for a bird to hold still long enough for me to photograph it. Usually, the go out of there way to dart behind a tree just as soon as I get them in frame. I advised the coot to get itself to someplace it belonged, and got on with my day.

That afternoon, back at the office, I saw the pair of coworkers responsible for the other sets of traps on that site. I was pretty sure it was their trail I was following, so I asked if they saw the coot. Blank stares, and I'm back to wondering if I'm loopy. The coot was right next to the trail, less than a foot away. It wasn't hiding, how did they miss it? I haul my camera back out quickly, and there's the photos, and there's the coot in the photos. I felt relieved, and you can laugh, but it's empty and lonely out in those woods, even with a silent partner tagging along sometimes. The coot had been there when I went by, but they hadn't noticed it when they passed through later in the day. I reasoned maybe it took my advice and went elsewhere, but I couldn't shake the feeling - based on how it held that leg, not to mention how it didn't take off when I crouched down two feet away - that it couldn't leave, even if it wanted to.

We were still shorthanded the next day (and for the next two weeks), so I had the opportunity to check. I found the coot. It was a little farther from the trail, back under the branches of a downed tree, still visible enough I wondered how my coworkers missed it. More relevantly, it was dead. What's strange is there's no sign anything tried to snack on it. The neck is broken, and there are any number of predators around that could have killed it that way, but it's unlikely they kill it and leave it there. They'd kill it to eat it, which would mean they'd either drag it someplace else (like a den), or rip it up and chow down right there. Which means something killed it just to kill it.

It's not the last time I met a coot in the woods, though.