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On the other hand, perhaps not.

Snakebird, I love you

Spindly yet striking, the anhinga is perhaps my favorite bird. Lesser souls may find the anhinga to be an ugly, awkward and vulgar creature, but these people have no taste and should not be listened to. No doubt these are the same folks who endowed the anhinga with its other, less glamorous names: Snakebird, or alternatively, Water Turkey.


How anyone can spend any time watching an anhinga live its life and not become an admirer is beyond me.

An anhinga has initiative. These enterprising birds dive right into the water to chase down their supper. Unlike the buoyant duck, the feathers of an anhinga are not coated with oils, so they can quickly get waterlogged. This allows them to swim for quite some time in search of fish.

And what a spectacle that is. Sometimes you can follow the progress of the submerged anhinga just by watching the water that's stirred up by fish trying to get away from it. Once they've emerged from the water, they have to spread out their wings to dry. While they're airing their feathers, they chatter noisily among themselves.


Recently, I was lucky enough to watch one of these characters catch and consume a meal. Between myself and spouse, we captured video and still images of the event. Here's the video. Forgive the running commentary from the four-year old, and the clicks of my shutter in the background.



I watched this same bird for another hour afterward. She'd spear a catfish (an exotic species in the Fakahatchee Strand), and she'd beat it against a branch for several minutes. Apparently, she has to make sure it's really, really dead before she swallows it, lest it thrash around and cut up her throat with its spines. I got no footage of this process; unfortunately, the above video took the last of my video camera's battery.

But the next day in Everglades National Park, I had the good fortune to run across a nest of anhinga chicks, and I'd had the foresight to charge my battery. Here's a (too) short clip of the two-day old chicks. I didn't want to spend too much time around the nest.

Bald Cypress

The cool thing about these conifers, apart from their wonderful knees and the fact that they harbor an unbelievably rich degree of wildlife, is that they lose their leaves in winter. (Larches are also conifers that shed their needlelike leaves.) Here's a brief clip of a tree from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in southwestern Florida.

P.S. This may not be even remotely interesting to anyone but me. Mr. T just viewed the clip and said, "I don't get it. What's the big deal?" There is none. I just a) really like trees and b) have been getting way too happy lately with the digital video recorder.

Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve

I can hear the alligator, but I cannot see her. I'm standing on a wood platform elevated a foot or two above the water, but the sound still startles me. She may no longer carry her babies on her back, but she remains close to and protective of them. She sees me on the platform, a large beast with three extra metal legs and a clicking black device on top of them.

I look around and realize I'm standing between the large reptile and one of her leathery tots. Off to my left side, the tiny gator is sunbathing on a log, its head down and legs splayed out to the side.

Mother emits a deep, rumbling growl of considerable volume. I suspect she's lying in the mud across the pond, about twenty feet away.

But she sounds ever so much closer.