__________________________________________________ _____________________________________
COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M.Krishnan : SNAKEBIRD............. : The Sunday Statesman : 27 December 2015
__________________________________________________ _____________________________________

DARTER

" I NEVER see a Darter without thinking of Archaeopteryx! There are other birds with strange, even bizarre, looks - the Spoonbill, Hornbill, the Florican and fantastistally mallet-like and pink Flamingo, for example. But for all their improbable shape and colour and plumage, they are patently birds; in fact their exaggerated oddness itself is peculiarly avian. Only the Darter suggests the reptilian ancestry of the birds.

To some extent, I suppose the scale-like patterning of the plumage conveys this suggestion, but it is the long, S-shaped serpentine neck, ending in the snake head and dagger bill, that gives the bird semi-reptilian look - and its common name, "Snakebird". Even when soaring on high on sharply triangular wings, the neck outstretched and pointed bill pointing slightly upwards, there is something definitely prehistoric-seeming about the Darter. But, of course, it is when it is swimming that the Snakebird is at its snakiest.

Last year, I had occasion to travel many miles each day along the waterspread of a dammed-up lake. The top boughs of great trees, which had once towered in the forest that was now the bed of the lake, jutted out of water here and there. Naked and gount, with the bark removed by submersion for almost a century and the wood closely pitted and textured, the projecting dead wood looked more like the fossilised outgrowth of some extinct, freshwater coral than the limbs of trees. Darters sat on these perches, lending the long-dead wood a quite primeval air.

Many of them sat with wings outspread, replete from a spell of underwater hunting, with the fully extended flights and long, spread tail "hung out" to dry in the air. They preened themselves from time to time and in spite of this display of wing and tail and the toilet peculiar to birds, the looked semi-reptilian still, the lanceolate, paleshafted plumes on the back and the snaky fluidity of the long, kinked neck very much in evidence.

At the approach of our boat they would close their wings, crouch low on their perch and extending their heads forward to the limit, peer anxiously at us. Then they would fly away, with rapid, rather laboured wingbeats, almost skimming the surface of the lake. But sometimes they would just drop down to the water, submerge and swim to the other side of the perch. One would expect a big-bodied bird like the Darter, dropping straight down into the water (and not nose-diving into it), to make an audible plop, but awkward as the move seemed it was both swift and soundless.

The bird would sink completely, and then for a minute there would be no sign of it; then 30 yards away, the sharp-jawed head of some watersnake would show up on an upraised neck, take a quick look around and submerge again. Surfacing again at a safe distance, the darter would swim around, watching us all the time.

Darters swim with the heavy body totally submerged and are much more at home in the water than in the air. I tried it twice, but could not get a swimming darter to fly by following it. It would submerge and reappear unexpectedly a fair distance away, and by the time the boat could be manoeuvred around it would be too far away to be chased. Incidentally, I had ample opportunity at this lake, to observe darters hunting and feeding. I never saw them hunting together, as their cousins, the Cormorants, do in shallow water. I can confirm what I have already said in these columns about their method of capturing prey; in spite of the power and rapidity with which they can shoot out their dagger bills at quarry (the kinks in their necks operate as a propulsive spring), they do not 'transfix' fish, as many have said they do, but catch their prey between the mandibles, like other fishers. Since all of a Darter's hunting is under water, I never saw the actual seizure of the prey, but usually the bird surfaced to swallow its catch, often flicking up a fish, held crosswise in the bill, into the air to catch it and swallow its head first. I never saw the prey transfixed on the bill. Fish are the main prey, but more than once I saw a questing Darter come up with something shapeless and unidentifiable in its bill, something that looked like a large aquatic snail, but which had no shell, obviously, for the bird swallowed its catch with ease. I wonder what it could have been."

- M.Krishnan

This was published on 4 June 1961 in The Sunday Statesman

# The sketch of the Snakebird has not been reproduced here.