Coot & Cootling

Well, a friend of mine sent me a message yesterday that rather rearranged my sense of balance... The message was:
"There are cootlings on Wandsworth Common!"
Before today I'd only ever seen pictures of cootlings; I'd never seen them with my own eyes... I'm now struggling to work out what would constitute a balanced response; I visited them twice today, but suspect that if I'm visiting both the goslings on Clapham Common, and the cootlings on Wandsworth Common then other aspects of my life may become neglected...
What a quandary.

Anyway, they are very funny looking things; all dishevelled-looking and tufty!
They behave funnily too: as I've mentioned before, I find coots quite bafflingly aggressive and confrontational. They are forever flapping at and chasing after each other or other birds (particularly moorhens). Well, it seems that this behaviour is with them from a very early age, because there are two cootlings, and while the parents were off fetching food for them, one of the cootlings decided to chase off a greylag goose and a couple of adult mallards, which was a quite bizarre sight. Seeing a small, defenseless, tufty-looking cootlet chasing after a large greylag (and making it beat a retreat) was somewhat surreal; I wish it'd been closer, because that'd have made an epic picture.

I took a lot of photographs; some of the ones I was most pleased with were ones of the parents feeding their young. The parents fetch food and tear it up before giving little pieces to their eagerly waiting young. It is very cute, but looks like a lot of work...

I imagine more pictures will follow.