Coot

an aquatic bird with the habits of a duck. It is popularly called a mudhen. The American coot is fifteen inches in length. It has bluish, slate-colored plumage, a black neck and head, and an ivory-white bill. In place of being webbed, the toes are fringed with greenish, curiously scalloped flaps. The coot does not take to wing freely, but patters along for a hundred feet or so, striking the surface of the water with the feet. It is a skillful diver, and, being worthless for food, it is bolder than the wild duck. The female lays from eight to fifteen buffy white eggs in a nest built of grasses in the reeds of a freshwater marsh. The range of the coot extends from Alaska and Greenland to the West Indies. The bird referred to in the lines from Tennyson's Brook, "I come from haunts of coot," etc., is the European cousin of this bird. See Grebe