Delayed Gratification
- 35 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Sometimes, despite putting in the effort, you don’t get the reward you'd hoped for. This is how I felt about my failure to get to grips with one of the America's most intriguing raptors, the Snail Kite Rostrhamus sociabilis. There are populations in the Florida Everglades, parts of the Caribbean, Central America and a great proportion of the tropical areas of South America. Despite having visited many of these areas, multiple times in some cases, it was a species I somehow kept missing.
On my third transit of the Panama Canal I finally got distant views of this distinctive bird of prey, but it wasn’t until my fifth such visit to Panama, during a gig for Fred Olsen Cruise Lines as part of the Ocean Wildlife Encounters team, that I belatedly got the experience I was hoping for.
Snail Kite is a supremely adapted predator. Though it is capable of taking a range of prey items, it almost wholly concentrates on apple snails and is considered to be a molluscivore. As such, this is not a bird of prey that needs to stoop at 200mph. Indeed its hunting strategy is a leisurely low-level quartering of emergent aquatic vegetation. It has relatively short but broad wings that provide plenty of lift for minimal effort.
Once a suitable accessible snail is spotted, often a leg-length under the water, it drops and deftly plucks the snail from the plant with its long, needle-fine, talons. Removing the snail from its shell requires the deployment of another precision tool.
The bill of a Snail Kite has specifically evolved to extricate its favoured mollusc prey from the protective shell. The long, slender, down-curving upper mandible is a ‘hand-in-glove' match for the rotation of the snail shell. It is the perfect ‘wincle-picker’. The body of the snail is impaled on the hook and rapidly shucked with a skill to make any French chef blush.
A trip in a small catamaran along the Panama Canal from Gamboa, organised by Rafa, our local guide, gave us access to an off-canal lagoon that provided the perfect habitat for this marvellous gastropod guzzler. The skill of our boatman allowed us to make an exceptionally close approach to several different birds. Keeping our movements minimal ensured that the birds paid us no heed whatsoever.
What a truly privileged encounter this was. You could look deep into the bird’s blood-red eyes and see every barb of every feather. This was a moment seared on my retinas. I have had a lifetime of depositing special wildlife encounters in my memory bank, this one was destined for the strong-room, never to be forgotten!
