Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
In winter, when the lake was frozen, three or four hundred wild duck, with teal and pochards, rested on it all day, and flew away at night to feed; while widgeons fed by day on its shores. Coots and water-hens used to come close to the windows and pick up food put out for them.
He found himself later skirting Stow Lake, pursued by flocks of ubiquitous coots, bent upon any stray crumbs flung in their direction. Finally he dipped suddenly down into the wilder reaches of the Park, taking aimless trails that wandered off into sandy wastes or fetched up quite suddenly upon the trimly bordered main driveway.
There, and on the borders and surface of the inland waters, in the marshes and creeks, besides the flamingos, scarlet curlew, and spoonbills, already mentioned, will be found greenish-brown curlews, sandpipers, rails, coots, gulls, pelicans, jabirus, nandapoas, crabiers, snipes, plovers, ducks, geese, cranes, and anhingas, most of them in vast abundance; some frequenting only the sea-coast, others only the interior, according to their different natures; all worthy the attention of the naturalist, all worthy of a place in the cabinet of the curious.
Amid this ever-shifting panorama, giving it life and beauty, covering pool and channel with merry, restless knots of diving, feeding, coquetting, quarreling swimmers, relieving the colorless ice with groups of jetty velvet and scoter ducks, gray and white-winged coots, crested mergansers in their gorgeous spring plumage, and fat, lazy black ducks, with Lilliputian blue and green winged teal, filling the air with the whirr of swift pinions, and the ceaseless murmur of the mating myriads, rested from their long northward journey, a host such as mortal eye hath seldom beheld, and which it hath fallen to the lot of few sportsmen to witness and enjoy.
When possible, they choose the former, because it gives them an abundance of fresh water, which is a daily necessity; and because, unlike the coots which are often found in great numbers on the same shoals, they dislike tossing about on the waves for any length of time. But late in the autumn they desert the ponds and are seldom seen there again until spring, even though the ponds are open.
The doctor asserted, "Sure, religion is a fine influence got to have it to keep the lower classes in order fact, it's the only thing that appeals to a lot of those fellows and makes 'em respect the rights of property. And I guess this theology is O.K.; lot of wise old coots figured it all out, and they knew more about it than we do."
The flash and report come together; there is a dull indescribable sound ahead, as some of the shot strikes home in fur and some drills into the turf, and then a rustling in the grass. The moorhens dive, and the coots scuttle down the brook towards the mere at the flash.
These little creatures swarm in the samphire marshes near the river, and possess voices far surpassing anything known in their species in Europe. I was once looking out for ducks or coots in a thicket of bulrushes higher than my head, when I was startled by hearing a loud "bomb!" at no great distance from me.
The pond in the enclosure should be fed with a large head of water so that it may be kept always fresh. "There are other kinds of similar birds, like teals and coots which may be fed in the same way. "Some even keep partridges, which, as Archelaus writes, conceive when they hear the voice of the male bird.
Coots have quite disappeared in some places: they are shot on ponds, having an ill reputation for the destruction of the fry of coarse or pond fish, as well as of trout. Not all these changes, indeed, are attributable to trout alone; but the trout holds a sort of official position and leads the van. Other southern rivers, with the exception of the Thames, are for the most part easily preserved.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking