at a snail's pace

Good deeds in nature are like anything else in life.


You often do not get to share in the rewards of your work.


Not so with our little swamp.  When we harvested the water lettuce and water hyacinth last year, we saw two immediate results.  And they both arrived on large wings.


The morning after we opened a small patch of the water, I discovered a wading bird I had never seen before.  Mottled brown and white.  And a bit shy.  He was aloft before I could get a good look at him.


At first, I thought he was a variety of ibis because of the down turned beak.  It turns out I was wrong.


He was a limpkin.  And he kept coming back.  Each time a little more confident.


It is amazing that I saw him at all.  According to my bird books and local birders, we are on the border of the limpkin's range.  They are not a common sighting.


More than one lives in the laguna.  You can hear them at night.  Their call is almost like a scream.  Chupacabra stalks in the dark.

But the limpkin was not our only new visitor. 


About a week later, I saw a large black bird with a white tail patch circling the pond.  Mexico has all sorts of eagles and hawks.  But I had never seen one like this.


When I finally got a good photograph of his bill, I decided I knew what he was.  Neither hawk nor eagle.  He was a snail kite.  The hooked beak betrayed his ancestry -- and diet.


But I have a few doubts about his identity. 


With the exception of the bill, he looks a lot like a common black hawk or a solitary eagle.  His build does not look like that of a kite.  And his legs certainly are not the orange tootsies found in bird identification books.

 

But it is not only his field marks that make me wonder if I have the correct name for him. 


If he is a snail kite, he is out of his range.  The limpkin may have been on the border, but as you can see on this range map, Melaque is not even close to the green area -- the snail kite homeland.


For now, he will be a snail kite.  And if he is, there may be a reason for these two birds to be out of their normal range.  They both feed on apple snails.  And the laguna offers a healthy buffet of snails for both species.


I have never seen one of the apple snails alive.  They have a snorkel that allows them to live underwater most of their life.

 

But whenever I clean out the vegetation, I find plenty of empty snail shells.


It is easy to see why both birds look for these snails.  They are big.  Almost as large as a man's fist.  I suspect, based on the pierce hole, this snail met its demise on the beak of a kite.


When I picked up the shell, it reminded me of something.  Those escargot kits that you can buy in "gourmet" shops with the empty shells and canned snails.  Having tried them, I suspect the kite is getting a better gastronomic deal.


There is a bit more vegetation to fish out of the inlet.  But, for now, I am going to enjoy the avian rewards that have come our way with a lot of hard work.