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While we were deploring our ill-luck, I noticed a flock of birds like ducks flying high up in the air; they made a wide circle and settled down on the top of a tree. L'Encuerado fired at them, and one fell. It was an anhinga, one of the most singular specimens of web-footed birds that can be found anywhere.
The opera-glass showed it at once to be a large bird sitting with its back toward me, and holding its wings uplifted in the familiar heraldic, e-pluribus-unum attitude of our American spread-eagle; but even then it was some seconds before I recognized it as an anhinga, water turkey, though it was a male in full nuptial garb.
The flesh of the anhinga is not valuable, as it is hard and tough. Perhaps a good appetite rendered me indulgent, but I found the flavor very much like that of duck. The fat of this bird, carefully saved, was used for frying our fish. The latter, I must confess, did not seem to us so nice as the dark-colored meat of the anhinga.
They were covered with a species of plotus, nearly resembling the anhinga, or white bellied darter. These birds perch in files, like pheasants and parrakas, and they remain for hours entirely motionless, with their beaks raised toward the sky.
Represent to yourself an enormous duck with a neck like a swan, a bill straight, tapering, and longer than the head, webbed feet, and widely spreading and well-feathered wings, and then know the anhinga. It dives and flies with equal facility, can swim under the water and perch upon trees, the highest of which it chooses for building its nest upon.
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