A Remarkable Bird, The Coot

Coots on the water in Oregon, from our trip last month.

The coot is a bird that most birdwatchers ignore and disdain. Coots have a funny walk, big knobby feet (not webbed like ducks’ feet), and an awkward way of taking off from the water’s surface. There are usually too many of them, too easy to find. Seeing coots is very different from seeing their close relatives, the rails, which are so elusive that they are a kind of birdwatchers' holy grail. It's true that the coots' young are quite colorful, but the adults are just grey, black, and white with a red eye: kind of dull. 

A coot with her chicks. Tucson, Arizona, last May.

When coots are around, you can usually find a few more exciting water birds nearby. Herons, ducks, swans... there's always the temptation to look away from the coots. In the South you can even find some of their more colorful close relatives, the moorhens. Coots inhabit most of the USA; they breed here in Michigan and then go south for the winter. Year-round populations of coots live in most of the more southern states and down through Mexico and Central America.

Here are some of Len’s cool coot photos:

Celery Bog, West Lafayette, Indiana

South Carolina.

Kona, Hawaii

In 1998, Smithsonian Magazine printed an article titled "Let's Root for the Coot" by Kenneth Brower. As you can probably tell by the title, the author would like to drum up some appreciation for this common bird. The article begins with the unfavorable dictionary definition of the coot:

"The disrepute of the coot is entrenched in our language. 'They are stupid and fly slowly, and can hardly be classed as game birds,' according to Webster's second edition, published in 1959. In its first sense, 'coot' refers narrowly to the genus Fulica, the coot proper; in its second sense, to surf ducks or scoters; and in its third, to 'stupid fellow; gull; simpleton; as a silly coot.'"

Brower includes quite a bit about coot behavior. The most intriguing coot trick, which I’ve never seen, is fighting. He writes:

"Coots fight like kangaroos, leaning back in the water and striking each other with their oversize feet. They specialize in dirty tactics, like holding and hitting. The basic coot combination—the old mud hen one-two-three-is to grip the opponent with one foot and slap him silly with the free claw, slip the shiv of the beak in, then attempt to force him over onto his back and hold him underwater. A coot fight is spectacular—a small, local hurricane of beating wings and white water."

Another view of the coot chick in Arizona.

The biggest surprise, I think, is the oddball appearance and color of the coot chick:

"The hatchling has a bald, pink- purple pate, above which levitates a mist of nearly invisible down. The naked skin of the brow, in a semicircle above either orbit, is painted an iridescent lavender-purple. From the base of the red beak, stubby orange feathers spread backward across the face. The chick wears a frazzled cape of sparse, lone, filamentous orange or yellow feathers over its dark underdown. The parable of the Ugly Duckling is turned upside down in coots."

I've been meaning to write about coots since one of the naturalists on our Oregon trip gave a talk based on Brower's work, and gave us a copy of the article. I definitely have more appreciation of coots, though in fact, I would rather get a look at a sora rail or a bittern.

Blog post © 2021 mae sander. Photos by mae and len sander.

Exploring the Work of Carl Milles

At Brookgreen Gardens in Litchfield, S.C. last week, we enjoyed the outdoor sculpture collections, particularly the Fountain of the Muses by Swedish sculptor Carl Milles (1875-1955). I fondly remember seeing several other Milles fountains. In particular, I remember the Meeting of the Waters, a large fountain in front of the Union Station in St. Louis where I grew up; Sunday Morning, a fountain near the Michigan League in Ann Arbor where I've lived for many years; and a number of works at Cranbrook around 50 miles from Ann Arbor.
 

A figure from the Fountain of the Muses in Brookgreen Gardens.
This is said to be a spiritual representation of Milles himself.

I also remember that a Milles fountain was in the middle of the dining room in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which strongly impressed me on a visit there when I was in college -- having a work of art inside of a restaurant seemed incredible to me at the time! Out of curiosity, I started looking up these fountains and the life and work of Carl Milles. To my surprise, I learned that the Fountain of the Muses that we saw last week was in fact the same work that was once on display at the Met:

"New Yorkers might well have a sense of nostalgia for his Fountain of the Muses (inspired by the story of the goddess Aganippe), which once lent an air of grandeur to the cafeteria of the Metropolitan Museum of Art but was packed off in 1982 to Brookgreen Gardens outside Charleston, S.C., during a period of reconstruction at the museum." (A Stockholm Sculpture Garden by Gunilla Martensondec, NYT, December 27, 1987)

The Fountain of the Muses in the dining room of the Metropolitan Musuem, 1955. (photo source)
This area of the museum is now the Greek and Roman section as documented in this article:
Redesigning the Met’s Home for Greek and Roman Art

Of course my earliest memories of Milles are of his fountain at Union Station in St.Louis.

This 1940s post card captures the way I remember the Milles Fountain at Union Station. My mother impressed on me
what a wonderful work of art this was! She must have remembered when it was installed in 1940.

"Sunday Morning" on the University of Michigan campus, which I photographed during a recent Ann Arbor Art Fair.

The Triton Fountain by Milles in the courtyard of the Chicago Art Institute. Photo from our visit in 2017.

This photo of the Orpheus Fountain at the Cranbrook Art Museum is courtesy of TripAdvisor.
Milles was on the faculty of the Cranbrook Academy near Detroit from 1931-1951.

Update January 29: I just checked on some of my older photos, and found that I've also seen Milles works at Shaw's Garden in St. Louis: 

"Two Girls Dancing (1914-1917) is Milles’ earliest work in the Garden. Later works Sunglitter (1918) and Orpheus Fountain Figures (Male and Female) (1936) border on the east and west of the three angels with musical instruments, from 1950, in the center basin." (source)

My photo from Shaw's Garden, April, 2011.
Background: the iconic Climatron and some glass
sculptures by Chihully.

Vacation Reading

During our recent vacation, I had quite a bit of time to read, both in airports and while relaxing in the condo where we stayed. Here's a brief summary of the books I read:

Hunger: A Memoir of my Body by Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay is a powerful social critic, and a suffering human being. She's experienced mistreatment and scorn because she's black and because she's very obese. Throughout this memoir, she keeps her focus on how her own pain connects to her experience in American life. As she describes being shunned, ignored, abused, hated, derided, blamed, and disrespected, the reader should cringe! Although many of the specific experiences she describes have been covered by others who were abused because of their race or size, her words are poignant.

Gay probes the causes of her obesity, which she says was a result of her having been raped when she was around 12 years old: she responded by trying to be as unattractive as she could, and she did this by eating to become fat. She describes the sympathy and loyalty of her parents during her lost years in her 20s, when she was very poor and lived in difficult circumstances. A sad and impressive book.

Here's a paragraph that embodies some of the things I'm trying to say:

"When you’re overweight, your body becomes a matter of public record in many respects. Your body is constantly and prominently on display. People project assumed narratives onto your body and are not at all interested in the truth of your body, whatever that truth might be. Fat, much like skin color, is something you cannot hide, no matter how dark the clothing you wear, or how diligently you avoid horizontal stripes." (Kindle Locations 1107-1110).

The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir by Anne Fadiman

A long time ago, culture could be classified into simplistic pigeon holes: highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow. These were very judgmental words! One of the biggest popularizers of middlebrow culture was named Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999). He was the moderator of a popular radio program titled "Information Please" from 1938 to 1951. He chose books for the Book-of-the-Month Club. I believe that he's now mainly forgotten.

In her memoir, Fadiman's daughter Anne Fadiman described his early life in Brooklyn. She discusses his parents who were poorly-educated immigrants, and how he left them behind. (Her grandfather died when she was 10 years old: she met him only once!) She tells how he went to Columbia University and managed to invent himself as a cultural icon. This story is very fascinating.

Anne Fadiman especially explores her father's love of wine, about which he wrote several books. It's details her struggle to love wine as much as her father did. One of the most interesting chapters of the memoir, in fact, is not about him at all, but about her discovery of modern neuroscience of taste and how it enlightened her about her lack of wine love -- and thus her fear that she was not a "good" daughter.

If you want to read only a part of the book this chapter was excerpted in the New Yorker: "How Science Saved Me from Pretending to Love Wine:The fault was not in my stars, nor in myself, but in my fungiform papillae." By Anne Fadiman, September 30, 2017.

Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef's Journey to Discover America's New Melting-Pot Cuisine by Edward Lee.

This book, I would say, is jut OK. Edward Lee, the author, seems to try too hard to be bold and imaginative. Sometimes I found him to be sort of a shadow of another famous Korean-American chef, David Chang.

Lee travels around America to immigrant communities, and tries to talk to the people who are cooking in ethnic restaurants. Sometimes they refuse to let him in the kitchens, and won't tell him anything. Sometimes they invite him into their homes and workplaces and the bars where they hang out. He tries to understand how they have adapted their native foods to America. Sometimes he seems to get more insights than other times. Sometimes I felt like his writing had too many clichés.

Lee's description of a visit to a Lebanese diner in Louisiana:

"The menu is split into three sections: Southern favorites, Lebanese foods, and Italian dishes such as spaghetti and lasagna. I order something from each section. Tom is impressed by my appetite. He has the girth of a chef who likes to eat and a handlebar moustache that he teases with his fingertips when he speaks. Tom and I talk about the history of Clarksdale, about food and authenticity, about what it means to have a culture sewn so tightly into the fabric of everyday life that it is normal for a white blue-collar worker to come here and ask for his kibbeh on a roll as though he were ordering a cheeseburger. This isn’t Lebanese food anymore, Tom tells me. This is Delta food and, more specifically, Clarksdale food."  (Kindle Locations 2029-2034).

St. Burl's Obituary by Daniel Akst.

This book was supposed to be a selection for my culinary reading group, but I think it's been deferred or replaced. I’m not liking it much — it’s very forced, and the plot gets worse as it goes along.

Burl, the main character, was a very very fat man. Having read Roxane Gay's book, I'm aware of how cruel it is to use a fat person in a book the way this book uses its protagonist. Yes, he does love food, and detailed food descriptions are a major thing in this book. But... But...

An example of how the author uses food and fatness:

"For his own meal he was constrained as usual by fastidiousness, or an overdeveloped sense of propriety. Burl loved barbecue, for example, and fried chicken, but was too self-conscious to eat it in public, imagining himself in the eyes of onlookers as a living Thomas Nast cartoon, or Henry VIII brandishing a drumstick. He settled on smothered rabbit, cooked crisp in an iron skillet but salty and moist on the inside, heaped with sautéed onions and served over grits, with coconut sweet potatoes and greasy, smoky-tasting stringbeans." (Kindle Locations 480-484). 

The End of Our Vacation

On our last night in South Carolina, we were amused by this mural on the wall at the entrance to Bistro 217 in the town of Pawley's Island. We had enjoyed the cuisine at the sister restaurant, Rustic Table, so we decided to eat at the more formal Bistro. (Website for the restaurant: here.)

My dinner: seared scallop salad with goat cheese. The salad menu is below.

As planned, we flew back home Thursday. Luckily, there was a gap in the snow and ice that have been falling on Michigan, and luckily, there were no serious delays.

Leaving South Carolina

Goodbye to beaches.

Goodbye to little towns like this: Georgetown, where the tourist boardwalk
looks over towards a working steel mill!

Goodbye to beach shacks like this -- Big Tuna -- and wonderful seafood.

Goodbye to shrimp & sausage Gumbo with Texas Pete hot sauce!

Goodbye to crabcakes: this one was especially wonderful! BIG TUNA website here.

Goodbye to little birds, shore birds, wading birds, and pelicans.

.... and goodbye to our wonderful hosts and touring companions, Arny and Tracy. And to Elaine and Larry. It's been a great week all together.

If all goes as planned, we'll fly home Thursday. Yesterday the Detroit airport was shut down by an ice storm, and government employees are still loyally working every day without pay. So we hope for good luck traveling!

Wordless Wednesday: Brookgreen Gardens

  

Website for Brookgreen Gardens here.

A South Carolina Farmer's Market

Lee's Farmers Market in Murrell's Inlet South Carolina, offers a wide variety of produce (not necessarily local), as well
as cooked food and deli products imported from New Jersey. Evidently the term "Farmers Market" doesn't mean the
same thing in South Carolina that it means in Michigan, where it denotes a market at which only farmers sell their products.

The definition doesn't matter: Lee's has delicious food and very friendly
workers. You can see that this roast beef had just been cooked in their kitchen.
We bought slices of it for dinner. Wonderful flavor!

This is Daphne who works in the kitchen. She had a deep southern accent. When I mentioned that we were used to
colder weather in Michigan, she said "Ooh whee!"

It was in fact a cold day for walking outside. We repeated our visit to the
marsh walk. A few days ago every seat here was taken by a person drinking beer.

Before our walk, we ate lunch at the River City Café. Good fish sandwich!

The Hunters and the Hunted

At Huntington Beach State Park, near the condo where we are staying, we watched this eagle fly over the water.

When the eagle arrived, many birds that had been sitting on a little sand spit flew away. He landed in their place and waited.

Birders who have been watching the area have seen the eagle swoop in
and take a ruddy duck like these.

Cormorants in the area also drew closer together as the eagle waited.

The eagle made an effort to grab an egret, and then flew away, leaving his prey for the time being.

Open water in marshy area of Huntington Beach State Park -- a magnificent birding spot. In the distance, you can
see the causeway across the water, which is a beautiful spot for wading birds.

Alligators also hunt birds and other creatures in the marshes of this area.

Here's another alligator swimming purposefully towards an ibis in the reeds.   

Happily, we didn't see the alligator grab this ibis, though of course we know
that all creatures have to live. And that we are the most predatory of them all.

Perhaps the victim of some human action, such as being hit by a boat -- this dead bottle-nosed dolphin was being
washed up by the surf onto the beach near our condo. Contemplating the life and death of the creatures we see is
challenging, but inescapable.