Cootling

Choosing today has been difficult...
I was torn: I was going to blip a handsome male tufted duck with beads of water on his back ("like water on a duck's back") and beautiful glassy water all around, but then I remembered that the cootlings will only be so little for so long...

So here is a(nother) cootling portrait.
This is one of the babies belonging to the parents with four young. They were being very funny today. Some people were throwing bread to the birds, and one of the cootlings got a (large) piece of bread and made off with it at speed. The other 3 all chased off after it, as did the mother, and some epic squabbling ensued. Coots are good at that... The mother was trying to grab the bread from the baby, and actually ended up with the baby's head partly in her mouth at one stage in the melee (I caught that on camera...). She got the bread in the end (when the baby "tripped" over the dangling bread as it was swimming"), but after only a few seconds another baby made off with it again.
It was very funny, because they're not even fending for themselves yet, and didn't really know what to do with the bread anyway; the mother fed them from it when she eventually confiscated it from all of her brood...

I'll blip a tufted duck another day.
Thank you for all your kind comments, ratings, and (even) favourites; they really lift me, and I'm really enjoying following the links back to your journals to see what sorts of things you're blipping. I'm sorry if I'm not replying or commenting very consistently, but I haven't yet got into the swing of checking more than once a day, or for long enough in my one blip session, which rather leaves me rushed to do all my blipping activities in one little (happy) flurry each day.