Another Anhinga...this one is hungry

One of the places that Tammy and I visited while in Florida was Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. If you enjoy bird watching, and are ever in south Florida, then Corkscrew should be on your agenda. It is too good to miss.

While in Corkscrew, we came across an Anhinga in the act of fishing. It dove into the marsh and swam around under the lily pads, occasionally sticking its beak up out of the water and lily pads (I guess for a bit of air). Eventually it came back to its roost (a log on some dry ground next to the marsh) with a fish to eat. The fish, however, was impaled on its upper mandible.

The Anhinga then spent the next few minutes flailing about, beating the fish on that log, in an attempt to knock the fish off its beak. When it finally succeeded, it got down to the business of getting the fish oriented properly so that it could go down the hatch. Mmmmmm...good eats!

Anhinga

When in Florida, you are almost certain to see an Anhinga at some point. When traveling on Anhinga Trail within the Everglades, your odds get even better. Often you will see Anhinga perched in a bush or tree, or even on something like a light pole, with their black and silvery wings spread out, as if someone had hung them out to dry on an invisible clothesline. Ironically, that is not very far from the truth.

Anhinga do not have waterproofed feathers (unlike ducks). This allows them to swim under water in search for food. But when they do exit the water, they need to dry their feathers to make flying easier (or possible).

Here are a couple of photos of an Anhinga taken from Anhinga Trail. The first shows the typical drying pose. The second is a close-up of the face that highlights the greenish color of the facial skin that males acquire during breeding.

You may notice that these photos are smaller than the photos that have previously appeared in this blog. This is simply a factor of the time required to manage my photos and post entries to this blog. My previous photo hosting choice (Phanfare) automatically gave me pictures that were resized to be 700 pixels on the long side. My new photo hosting choice (Flickr) automatically gives me pictures that are resized to be 500 pixels on the long side. I have been telling myself that I will continue to manually create resized pictures in Flickr that are my usual 700 pixels on the long side, but this appears to be taking more time that I would like, and it has the side-effect of creating clutter within my photo collection at Flickr. So, for now, I will be putting my blogged pictures on a diet, and linking in the 500 pixel version. If you click on a picture, you will be redirected to that photo within my collection at Flickr, where you can see lots of other sizes of the photo (all constructed automatically by Flickr), look at other photos from me, leave comments on specific pictures, and all kinds of other Flickr goodness.

Anhinga

I was going through some photos yesterday when I realized there was a couple of photos from my recent trip to Orlando that I intended to put into a blog post, but somehow forgot to. I am fixing that now. These pictures are from Orlando Wetlands Park.

Anhinga are fairly common in Florida. You often see them perched somewhere sunning themselves to dry their feathers. When it is time to eat, they swim under water to catch their food. Their body remains underwater when they surface for air, leaving only their long neck and head sticking out of the water.

Aggressive Osprey

After visiting both Split Oak Mitigation Forest and Moss Park, I made a trip to Tibet-Butler Preserve. This is a chunk of land on the side of a lake. All other sides of the lake are being developed into subdivisions.

One trail within the Tibet-Butler Preserve takes you to the edge of the lake where you might get a glimpse of Ospreys. I managed to see not only an Osprey, but an Osprey that was, for whatever reason, showing some aggression towards an Anhinga.

I do not have a picture of the "victim" Anhinga prior to the incident, but he was perched at the top of a tree sunning himself. This picture of a different Anhinga shows what I mean.



This is a picture of the aggressor. In this case it is the Osprey that decided to dive-bomb the Anhinga perched at the top of a tree.



The result was captured in this picture. The poor Anhinga was doing everything it could to not fall all the way to the ground or swamp or whatever was at the bottom of the tree.



There was a happy ending. The Anhinga did manage to pull itself back up to a perched position. I just wish I had captured the impact where the Osprey actually knocked the Anhinga from its original perch.