Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Eurasian Coot - A brutal parent?



Last week I visited Kabini with my friend. While going to Kabini & returning back, we used to stop at the lake on the way near HD.Kote, which usually have plenty of bird life, like jacanas, coots, ducks, egrets, herons, storks and ibis. Also, sometimes, we could see marsh harriers and kites.

This time, while coming back from Kabini, we stopped for some time and were watching for the bird life. We noticed a coot with 2 chicks foraging near the banks in between the grass shoots. It looked like the adult coot was feeding the chicks. The chicks were following the adult wherever it goes. At one point, the adult coot did some body language by dipping the head under water, and left the chicks. May be it went in search of food. The chicks obediently stayed back obeying its parent. The adult came back and again fed the chicks.

After sometime, we observed that the adult coot started attacking one of the chicks, repeatedly. It was biting the chick's head, and chasing it away. It was strange to watch that. Though the adult was attacking the chick, the chick repeatedly was behind the adult.
May be this is some kind of child favoritism, we thought. Some more references I could see in Wikipedia are here:

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Coots can be very brutal to their own young under pressure such as the lack of food. They will bite young that are begging for food and repeatedly do this until it stops begging and starves to death. If the begging continues, they may bite so hard that the chick is killed.[6]
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At least some coots have difficulty feeding a large family of hatchlings on the tiny shrimp and insects that they collect. So after about three days they start attacking their own chicks when they beg for food. After a short while, these attacks concentrate on the weaker chicks, who eventually give up begging and die. The coot may eventually raise only two or three out of nine hatchlings.
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