“Everybody remembers the recipe for cooking a coot: put an ax in the pan with the coot, and when you can stick a fork in the ax the coot is done.’’

— John Gould, in “They Come High,’’ in New England: The Four Seasons (1980)

Coot hunting used to be a favorite coastal New England sport in November. My father was one of the enthusiasts for a few years, operating out of a duck blind on the shore of Massachusetts Bay. The culinary charms of these stringy, oily birds elude me.

— Robert Whitcomb