The anhinga swims like a snake and must hang its wings out to dry
When an anhinga swims, only its slim neck shows above the surface, looking like a snake about to strike. The Tupi people of Brazil called it the devil bird or snake bird, and English speakers borrowed their word. Oddly for a diving bird, its body feathers soak through every time it goes under.
Found in the warmer parts of the Americas, the anhinga is about 89 cm long with a wingspan of 1.14 metres. Males are glossy greenish black with white streaks on the back and a white-tipped tail, while females have a pale buff head and neck. It has no external nostrils; instead it breathes through small flaps at the corners of its beak. A special hinge between the eighth and ninth neck vertebrae gives the neck its kinked shape and powers the strike.
Hunting happens underwater. Dense bones and waterlogged plumage make the bird almost neutrally buoyant, so it can sink fully and stalk fish among weeds, kicking with yellow webbed feet. It then shoots its neck forward and stabs, using both mandibles for larger fish or just the lower one for small ones, before surfacing, flipping the catch into the air and swallowing it head first. Diets include sunfish, bass, catfish, crayfish, tadpoles and even small terrapins.
The price of that soaked plumage is a long drying session. Unlike ducks, anhingas cannot oil their feathers from a preen gland, and they lose heat quickly, so they perch on logs with wings spread and tail fanned, their backs to the sun. The pose, and that broad tail, earned the nickname water turkey. A wet anhinga can barely fly, flapping hard and running across the surface to escape danger.
It looks a lot like a double-crested cormorant, but only the cormorant has a hooked bill, and only the anhinga glides. Birds at the edges of the range drift toward the equator in winter, and strays have turned up as far north as New York. Protected in the United States since 1918, the species is rated of least concern across a range of some 15,000,000 square kilometres.
Source: Anhinga
