Another visit to West Park, and another visit to the nest of the brooding coots, so see whether the eggs had hatched yet. At first it seemed not. Something was going on. Both birds were on the nest, doing things it was hard to make out, but staying longer than when there was a shift change in brooding duty [first four pictures].
I went a short distance to look at other things which were happening (more about this in the next few days). Ten minutes or so later, I came back to where I could see the coots’ nest. This time, the tuft of reddish feathers of a very young coot chick were visible. It isn’t very clear in the pictures, but there were at least two, and possibly three chicks. The parents were pushing something white out of the nest: fragments of the now redundant shells. Keeping half an eye on the nest for a while longer, nothing new happened.