Scientific name: Anhinga rufa
The male is mainly glossy black with white streaking, but females and immature birds are browner. It is recognizable by its very long neck with a thin white lateral neck stripe against a rufous background colour. The pointed bill should prevent confusion with cormorants.
In southern Africa it is fairly common in Zimbabwe, northern and eastern Botswana, South Africa and patches of Namibia and Mozambique. It generally favours still or slow-moving bodies of freshwater, especially with dead trees, rocks or banks where it can rest. It is rarely found in fast-moving rivers, estuaries and coastal lagoons.
t eats fish, using its webbed feet to dive underwater before stabbing the fish with its bill. It swims more slowly than cormorants, but it compensates by being more stealthy, gliding through the water with just its neck showing and barely producing a ripple. Its feathers are much more water absorbent than most water birds, making it less buoyant and prone to death by cold. It combats this by drying itself after foraging, spreading its wings in the sun. It sometimes hangs motionless in the water, ambushing the fish then coming to the surface to toss it in the air and swallow. The prey may be lost in the process of this manoeuvre: in one case the caught fish was just to large, so after struggling for 30 minutes to swallow it gave up.
