The Cootie Portal

February 6, 2022

It’s a cold morning, just below freezing. Most of the lake has melted but the edges and the coves, where the water is shallow, have a thin layer of ice. I’ve taken my seat on the ground in a cove with a small hill behind me that graciously blocks the north wind. A layer of ice covers about 20 feet of ice between me and the open water. The sun will rise directly in front of me, in the southeast portion of the sky. To both my left and my right, where the hill ends, there are patches of vegetation in the water now brown and dormant.

Looking to my left in the cove

Around the edge of the hill on the left, one little American coot appears. American coots are a little like water chickens. They move along with almost a forward and back rocking motion, often swimming along the edges of the water and foraging in the vegetation. I call them cooties because they seem so sweet and gentle that somehow they need a soft name. They squeak as they move, like a squeaky toy for a pet. It’s a sound that is easy to miss unless you sit near them in the quiet.

This little cootie swims along the edge of the ice in front of me from the vegetation patch on my left to the vegetation patch on my right. Then he turns around and swims back towards the vegetation patch on my left. When he reaches the end, he turns around and swims back to my right - but now he is not alone. Now there are two.

The two little cooties repeat the pattern, but now they are also stopping along the way to dive for whatever is beneath the water that I can’t see. They aren’t really made for diving so they have to kind of jump up in the air and plunge their head down to get under the water. Their feet are so huge for the size of their body that they splay them to the side to get their feet out of the way. Imagine heron feet on a chicken and that’s cootie feet. I can’t help but laugh a little watching them!

When these two cooties get back to the vegetation on my left, they once again turn around - and now there are four. The four cooties swim back to my right, jumping and diving and forage a little. Now I’m just delighting in watching the jumping and diving and squeaking and feeling gratitude for such simple enjoyment in my morning. Again they coots swim back across to my left. When they reach the end and turn around, more cooties have joined them.

As the sun rose, they continued their journey, swimming back and forth between me and the rising sun. This pattern continued for an hour, every time they turned around on my left side there were more cooties. By the time I left there were at least 40! No new coots ever came from the left unless the main pack of cooties had gone to get them. I decided it was some kind of cootie portal that only coots could open to let their friends in! Either that or there was some kind of cootie multiplier hidden in that vegetation.

One little coot must have sensed how much I LOVE giant, green cootie feet. She swam right over near me, climbed out on the ice just long enough to show me those feet, then stepped back into the water. Such generosity!

Maybe she’s showing me her nails?

Coots are social creatures though occasionally I will see one swimming alone. They aren’t particularly graceful and they aren’t particularly popular. Like me though, they are consistent. They show up day after day and do what they do. On this day I am particularly able to receive the playful gift of sweet gentleness they have to offer.

This week I have been struggling to write a post. I have at least three versions started but it wasn’t going anywhere and I realized I was “trying”, perhaps trying to write something “worthy” or “meaningful. I finally relinquished the effort and understood that sweet, gentle cooties were called for. Perhaps I’m not the only one who needed this gift this week.

One last picture of cootie magic, taken a few days later when the ice was frozen solid. These sweethearts don’t always stay the winter here, I’m glad they have hung around this year.