No, it is not a Coot baby, and I will show you what it is.
My way of doing things is to stand in an unobtrusive spot, and to search the water surface for activity. One also has to listen for the give-away calls of water birds, and then a closer look to inspect the area where the call seems to come from. I have seen so many persons running up to the water with their cameras when they see something, and then the something simply disappears. Birds, and especially fish, don't like rapid movements, and they will dive down at the slightest provocation.
The easy way, or at least for me, is to take up a spot and to wait. While waiting I just continue to scan the water surfaces, and it works for me as you will see in here. Birds are not blind, and if they see unnatural movement they will simply sound the alarm, and if they have babies, they will disappear into hiding very quickly. We have many birds of prey here, and over time the water birds have been trained by the birds of prey to avoid them at all costs. Luckily today, there were no predators around.
This is one of my favorite photography venues.
Now there you go, and they are Moorhen babies (Gallinula chloropus).
Look how the babies were watching the mom to see what she eats.
But they cannot eat yet and waited for the mom to feed them.
Oops! The mom saw me, and so she sounded the alarm the babies disappeared into the water lily leaves.
They were in this section of water lilies below the bridge.
So, I walked on to the bridge, and I took shots of some grass carp fish in the dam.
And, to close the post, just a lovely shot of a water lily.
Let's see what Wikipedia has to say about the Moorhen.
Moorhens are medium-sized water birds in the genus Gallinula, Latin for 'little hen', in the rail family Rallidae. The genus currently includes seven species, of which one is extinct, and two others probably are. Three species formerly included in Gallinula have been found to have enough differences to be placed in two separate but closely related genera, Paragallinula (with one species, lesser moorhen Paragallinula angulata), and Tribonyx, the two native hens of Australia.
Tribonyx differs visually by shorter, thicker and stubbier toes and bills, and longer tails that lack the white signal pattern of typical moorhens. The moorhens are also close relatives of the coots (Fulica), but the swamphens (Porphyrio), formerly also thought to be close relatives, are now known to be less closely related.
I was so thrilled to get those babies, and the difference between them and coot babies is that the moorhen babies have no yellow colors on their heads. I have posted the coot babies before, and on this occasion, I couldn't get the moorhen mom actually feeding one of the babies. But now I know that they are there and I will try to go back there and to get a shot of the mom feeding one of the babies.
Such is life.
I hope you enjoyed the pictures and the story.
Photos by Zac Smith. All-Rights-Reserved.
Camera: Canon PowershotSX70HS Bridge camera.
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