At Silver Creek near Show Low, Arizona, Jessa found a pair of American coots and a pair of pied-billed grebes associating as a flock, swimming together and preening together. I was off fishing (with only moderate success in the howling wind), so Jessa got to spend some time with the birds.
In Louisiana, a coot is a poule d'eau, a water chicken, but another folk name is mudhen. The bird's lobed toes are an adaptation for swimming, and I believe they may also help the bird "snowshoe" in soft mud. This one was a dry-dirt hen, no snowshoes needed, but Jessa's photos show the lobed toes well.
Grebes, though not at all related to coots, also have lobed toes. Grebes almost never venture onto solid ground, but one of them obligingly demonstrated for Jessa. Notice how far back the leg is on the body? That's why grebes confine themselves to the water: the stern-mounted legs provide excellent propulsion underwater, but grebes do not stand or walk well.
The pied-billed grebe is known colloquially as the dabchick or helldiver. I sometimes call them "peanut butter grebes", a habit I picked up many years ago and based on the informal abbreviation "PB grebe" that some of my Audubon companions used in field notes.
Silver Creek: not such a bad place to live if you're a poule d'eau or a dabchick, or even a peanut butter grebe.
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