Moorhenling!

Yay! I saw a moorhen chick (actually, forget that: I'm sticking with moorhenling) on Blip last night, and was SO jealous, having never seen one for myself...

I went to Eagle Pond this morning to visit the goslings; it was freezing (well, the air was just chilly, but there was a brutally cold wind), but on the way back to the car I spied a moorhenling peering shyly out of the long grass! I was so excited, and took a couple of pictures (from a distance), but went back this afternoon to see if I could see it again, and it turns out that there are three of them! They're very shy, and hide if you approach them, so it is tricky to get as close as you can with the goslings or cootlings.

Their feet are absurd! Coots' feet are very odd, and moorhens' feet are strange, but the foot-body mismatch on these chicks is absolutely incredible; they look like their feet have been transplanted from an entirely different (and much larger) creature (possibly some sort of black, anisodactylous iguana...). I would say "I suppose, at least, they'll grow into them", but the situation isn't that much less absurd in the adults.

I also witnessed a behaviour that seemed very peculiar: the parent moorhen kept taking offence at something a chick was doing, and would chase after them pecking and biting at them (I've a photo of the parent with a chick's head in its mouth). The chicks seem scared and would run away only stopping to turn around, sit down, and look up submissively from time to time, but that hardly works and the adult just pecks at them until it randomly decides they've been punished enough and goes back to feeding them. The chicks seem to bounce back pretty quickly, but I'm not really sure what is going on. Perhaps it is trying to encourage them to fend for themselves; does anyone else know? It happened to more than one chick, but it was specific: the parent was only after an individual chick on each occasion.

I like this photo because the moorhenling looks so baffled by the pigeon, while the pigeon looks like it is strutting its stuff, or on parade (perhaps practising for the next royal event).
The chick just doesn't know what to make of it:
"Should I run away, or should I learn from its marching technique?"
"How come its feet so small?"