Out of patience

Learning to look

Three years ago I had only just started coming to Het Vinne. I knew next to nothing about birds, and I had owned my 500mm lens for about a month. I was still learning what to film. That day I was sitting in the northern hide, filming a coot family feeding their chicks. Coot chicks beg for food all day long. Nothing special, you would think.

A firm telling-off

Until one of the parents grabbed its own chick by the head and shook it, hard and violently. The chick tried to escape but was pursued by what appeared to be an enraged parent. It looks brutal, but within seconds it was over. The rage stopped and everything was peaceful again, as if nothing had happened.

A sibling steps in

When one chick gets told off like that, another sometimes rushes to help. Without hesitating, it attacks the parent handing out the punishment. That is exactly what happened here: a second chick seemed to step in.

Nobody watched

I remember thinking: what is going on here? What is it doing to its own chicks? I found it horrible. I posted the footage on YouTube as an ordinary video, not a Short. Nobody watched it. In the three years that followed, I saw the same behaviour many times. It became normal to me. I still didn’t know what it was. I just thought: an angry bird, a bit out of balance, taking it out on its young.

A quick cut

Early this year I started making reels and YouTube Shorts. After the swarm reel, I wanted another success, but you can’t film something remarkable every week. So I went back to the coots. I wanted it done fast. I opened the old Premiere Pro project, put the footage in a new vertical sequence, cut out a short piece and posted it. Very little work. I didn’t expect much. At least the algorithm would see I was active.

3.8 million views

Then it took off. I didn’t understand why, until we looked into it. Most of the people liking the reel were from the Middle East, people living with war, where children are so often the victims of adults. The very first comment was in Arabic. Roughly: “Look, even among animals the children are the victims of the adults.” It was probably shared in a group somewhere, on WhatsApp or Telegram. I don’t know where. But the likes kept coming in.

Two audiences, two stories

Then it spread on Facebook, to an older audience, and the conversation changed. Many said: those nasty coots, they do that to everything. Others explained what was really going on. And what sparked so many reactions everywhere was the other chick: the way it went for the adult to defend its sibling. That feeling of sticking together, of standing up against something unjust.

What was really going on

Coots often start with five or six chicks, and in the end only two or so remain. The parents don’t feed them all equally. The weakest don’t make it. Biologists who studied American coots have a name for the shaking: tousling. Parents grab a chick by the head and shake it, mostly the bigger ones that rush to the food first, so the smaller ones also get a chance to eat (Bay Nature). The way I see it now, I filmed the parent testing that chick: can it take this, how does it defend itself? And then its sibling answered. Three years ago I saw cruelty. Now I see a coot family deciding who makes it.