My friend John called to invite me to see the rare Eurasian whooper swan than was visiting some fields 75 miles north of me. I said, “Thanks for the invite but I am going down to the lake to watch some coots.”
Coots are duck-like but not ducks that I and many birders often think of as don’t-get-excited-about, no-account urban-ish shallow pond birds. Actually they are more closely related to the whooping crane than to any duck. They are playful, social, and entertaining.
A woman had asked me to make a piece about these playful coots. I pickup up my binoculars and headed down to our local Capitol Lake. This lake is actually a dammed up estuary at the southern end of Puget Sound. Sediment from the Deschutes (Washington) River that that ends there quickly filled the lake so the water body is shallow and usually scummy. Coots love it!
The commission gave me an excuse to sit for a few hours doing nothing but getting to know coots. Since it was a sunny day, the droplets of water sparkled remarkably when the birds frolicked, hence the inclusion of the feather-water-dots in the piece that I subsequently made.