{"id":20045,"date":"2013-11-18T06:22:02","date_gmt":"2013-11-18T13:22:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=20045"},"modified":"2013-11-18T06:22:02","modified_gmt":"2013-11-18T13:22:02","slug":"gadwall-stealing-food-from-a-coot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/11\/18\/gadwall-stealing-food-from-a-coot\/","title":{"rendered":"Gadwall Stealing Food From A Coot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gadwalls are well-known for stealing food (kleptoparasitism) from American Coots .\u00a0 They eat the same kinds of food (submerged aquatic vegetation),\u00a0Gadwalls are almost a third bigger than coots and the two species often feed together in mixed flocks so being the bullies\u00a0on the block, Gadwalls can’t resist taking advantage of the situation.<\/p>\n

Some of these images are out of sequence as I tried to pick the best shots from several sequences to demonstrate the behaviors.<\/p>\n

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\"gadwall<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/500, f\/8, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I’d never seen the behavior until a few years ago when I was photographing a variety of waterfowl at Farmington Bay\u00a0on Christmas Eve day.\u00a0 The early morning air was very cold and this Gadwall was covered with\u00a0water droplets that would immediately freeze to ice.\u00a0 The feathers on the top of its head were soaked and frozen stiff.<\/p>\n

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\"gadwall<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/500, f\/8, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0This particular Gadwall had the art of stealing food from coots down to a science.\u00a0 It would relentlessly follow very closely behind the coot waiting for it to dive for food.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"gadwall<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/500, f\/8, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0In fact the bill of the duck was sometimes touching the rump of the coot when it dived.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"gadwall<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/500, f\/8, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0Here the coot is just submerging.\u00a0 The water was fairly deep but the Gadwall seemed to know pretty accurately where the coot would come up.\u00a0 It would wait patiently on the surface…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"gadwall<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/500, f\/8, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

for the coot to pop back up with food.\u00a0 Here the coot is just breaking the surface of the water as it emerges and the next frame…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"gadwall<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/500, f\/8, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0shows the coot on top but still covered with a sheet of water.\u00a0 This time it didn’t come up with food.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\"gadwall<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/500, f\/8, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Often the coot would attempt to swallow the food with its head underwater before the duck moved in but the Gadwall was always there in a heartbeat to take advantage.\u00a0 Often I didn’t know which bird actually ended up swallowing the food.<\/p>\n

I was surprised at how nonchalant both birds were in this situation.\u00a0 There was no frantic fighting over the food and each bird was relatively\u00a0calm\u00a0as they competed for breakfast.\u00a0 Sometimes the coot was able to swallow the food before the Gadwall snatched it away and sometimes it wasn’t but neither bird got too excited about it.<\/p>\n

I wish I hadn’t deleted the few shots I was able to get that showed the food on the surface but this happened before I was blogging and since those images weren’t of very good quality I trashed them.<\/p>\n

Live and learn…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gadwalls are well-known for stealing food (kleptoparasitism) from American Coots . They eat the same kinds of food (submerged aquatic vegetation), Gadwalls are almost a third bigger than coots and the two species often feed together in mixed flocks so being the bullies on the block, Gadwalls can’t resist taking advantage of the situation.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20052,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1051,334,392,394,1753],"tags":[1052,397,1754,1430,1755],"class_list":["post-20045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-coots","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-gadwall","tag-american-coot","tag-farmington-bay","tag-gadwall-2","tag-kleptoparasitism","tag-stealing-food"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/gadwall-3488-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-5dj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}