Birdwatchers in Brooklyn, N.Y., were naturally thrilled to see an odd, awful bird called an anhinga at their regional Paradise Pond just recently; it was far from its home in southern seaside areas, such as Houston.
The anhinga looks a little unusual, like a cross in between a snake and a cormorant. It’s informally called a “snake bird” for swimming in dirty water with its body below the surface area while its long neck and dagger-shaped beak patrol menacingly above the surface area. It’s likewise referred to as an American darter.
As water birds, anhingas live near freshwater swamps, creeks, bayous and woody ponds. And given that our location consists of numerous wetland areas, we’d not be amazed to see anhingas at our regional forest parks with ponds or along tree-lined creeks and bayous. Freshwater swamps near seaside zones and close-by woody state parks are likewise preferred areas for anhingas.
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- Anhingas, aka American darters, remain in the family Anhingidae, that includes Oriental darters, Australasian darters and African darters.
- The anhinga name originates from a Brazilian Tupi Indian word for “devil bird.”
- Anhingas in North America have actually been called “water turkeys” for their fan-shaped tails and “snake birds” for their long, thin necks.
- The birds dine mainly on little fish however will likewise consume tadpoles, crawfish, water pests, water snakes and freshwater shrimp.
- They form monogamous bonds and normally nest in the vegetated forks of tree limbs overhanging water.
“Anhingas have an adequate circulation from the southeastern U.S., well into South America. Although their common variety in the U.S. is the southeastern part of our nation, it’s not uncommon for them to distribute as far north as New England and Canada,” said Dan Brooks, manager of vertebrate zoology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
It might be misinterpreted for a cormorant when setting down on a tree snag or a limb over a pond, other than it normally holds its thin neck and beak directly, unlike a cormorant. Its stomach looks like a cormorant, however its wings are much wider and its tail fans out like a turkey’s.
It swims as stealthily as a water snake and all of a sudden arches its versatile neck vertebrae to stab a fish with its greatly pointed beak. Then it will sling the fish into the air, just to re-catch it to gulp down headfirst. When capturing a fish too huge to toss into the air, the bird brings its victim onshore and scrapes it versus a stump or woody greenery to remove it from the beak prior to stabbing it to death.
Although it’s a water bird, the anhinga does not have duck-type plumage that keeps water from soaking its plumes. Instead, it has “wettable plumage,” indicating plumes that end up being water-soaked when swimming.
Anhingas keep their bodies from ending up being cooled by spending much of their time set down on limbs with their wings spread out broad to soak up convected heat from the sun, like individuals lying under the sun after dipping into the pool.
Email Gary Clark at [email protected]. Book of Texas Birds, by Gary Clark with photography by Kathy Adams Clark (Texas A&M University Press.)
