Risin’ time

“A north wind crept over the trees to chill the air … Thin cloud came to spit drizzle over all. Even the rabbits left off their morning meal and went to ground”

Country Sights and Sounds
John Shelley

IT WAS 5.30am and the world was already bright. The air outside the window was still, the leaves hanging motionless as if carved or painted in their places. It was warm too, full of promise for the hours ahead.
I walked to the lake. A greater-crested grebe hunted fry in the shallows, slipping under the water with a barely audible ‘sloop’, sending a series of concentric circles spreading round each dive to warp the otherwise perfect reflection that the water held. The bird surfaced with a fish held crossways in its bill and gave a shake of its head, before swallowing its meal head first. Is it experience or instinct that teaches them to swallow their food this way, so that the spiny dorsal and pectoral fins of fish like perch, which abound here and must form the bulk of the diet for most fish-eaters, do not catch in the throat on the way down?
A pair of coot, all in black apart from the featherless white shields upon their foreheads, chugged with their peculiar, mechanical rhythm along the edge of the reeds, picking at the carpet of spent flies that lay dead on the water. Coots are largely vegetarian but will happily turn their attention to other food sources, especially when these are abundant, as now. Their regular habit of diving for submerged plants has earned them colloquial names such as black diver and white-faced diver, but in Scotland they are water crows and elsewhere water hens.
In summer this bird makes an easy living, feeding either on emerging plants at the surface or on submerged vegetation just below. But when aquatic delicacies die back during the winter months it must work harder, diving to a depth of six feet or more to gather food from the water bed, which is brought to the surface to be consumed.
Taking the healthy and natural diet into consideration I would imagine that a brace of coot would be a tasty addition to the larder, but I can find no reference to their being eaten. The few we have with us are too valuable for culinary experiment. We could only eat them once, whereas we can watch their antics over and again. Irish and European wildlife laws also keep them off the menu.
A month ago our coot pair produced half a dozen little bobs of ‘cootlets’, which followed their parents in single file for a week or so until they were picked off one at a time, probably by a mink. Mink numbers seem to have tapered off after peaking three or four years ago. Back then they showed up everywhere and wrought havoc among the waterfowl, slaughtering just about every one of the ducklings, cygnets and other young birds for several seasons in succession.
This year, a number of broods have survived, but not the coots. The adults will have a second clutch of eggs very soon; we hope they will fare better than their lost siblings.
I would not be sorry if I never saw another mink here, but that is an unlikely prospect. The survival of a reasonable number of young birds is almost certainly due to the abundance of more-easily-obtained food, rather than to the scarcity of these voracious creatures.
This spring and summer has been particularly kind to many other species, including the rabbit. Just a year ago we seldom saw rabbits in this area; now they appear at almost every turn, and the youngsters in particular make an easy meal. When they first emerge from their underground nests at about five weeks of age they are particularly vulnerable, being quite unaware of the concept of danger.
Yet they soon learn to recognize the typical rabbit warning signs, such as the sharp ‘thud-thud’ of powerful hind feet on the ground and the white flash of a retreating scut. Still, the number of young rabbits that survive to adulthood is a small percentage of those that are born.
A north wind crept over the trees to chill the air and riffle the lake. Thin cloud came to spit drizzle over all. Even the rabbits left off their morning meal and went to ground.