Oriental Darter | Chera Kozhy | Anhinga melanogaster | ചേരക്കോഴി | Snake Bird | WIldlife | Birds

Oriental Darter. In ‘Malayalam’ vernacular, the bird is called as “ Chera Kozhy”. The scientific name of the bird is Anhinga melanogaster
Oriental darter is a resident bird of Kerala State, India. The bird occurs in wetland and coastal belts with shallow water bodies, slow-flowing rivers, swamps and reservoirs and also at estuaries or tidal inlets and coastal zones with mangroves and lagoons in small groups. The bird requires scattered emergent trees or islets with dense vegetation.
The bird is slightly bigger than the cormorant. Its body remains submerged as it swims, and the slender neck alone is visible above the water, which accounts for the colloquial name of ‘snakebird’.
The adult bird’s plumage above is black. The wing coverts and tertials having silvery streaks along the shaft. The crown and neck are brown shadings to black towards the back of the neck. Face and throat almost whitish. The underparts are blackish brown. The tail is long and made up of twelve stiff feathers which are dragged along the ground when the bird attempts to walk or hop on land. The legs and webbing on the foot are yellow in immatures and non-breeding birds while breeding birds have darker grey tarsi and toes with yellow webbing.
Bird has a very long neck. The structure of the neck is as in other species of darter with strongly developed muscles that allow it to be flexed and darted forward with rapid force to stab fish underwater. The edges of the commissures of the mandible tips have minute inward-pointing serrations that hold impaled fish. The iris is white with a yellow ring around it. The tip of the upper mandible is dark while the base is pale brown bill while the lower mandible is yellowish.
The sexes are not easily distinguishable. Adult females have a shorter bill. Young birds have a pale brown neck and appear whitish on the underside and lack the white streak along the side of the neck.
They usually forage singly, with the entire body submerged, swimming slowly forward using their webbed feet while the head and neck are moved jerkily above the water. It darts its neck to impale fish and then brings them out of the water, tossing them into the air before swallowing the fish head first.
They may sometimes be found along with cormorants which share the habit of spreading out their wings to dry when perched on a waterside rock or tree.
The breeding season is April–May in Kerala. They nest in mixed species, especially with cormorants where they build a stick platform on the nest tree which is usually surrounded by water. Several pairs may nest close to each other. The branch is flattened by the birds prior to the placement of the sticks that form the nest platform.
The usual clutch consists of two to six spindle-shaped bluish-green eggs with a white chalky covering that gets soiled over time. Both parents incubate the eggs, beginning after the first egg is laid which leads to asynchronous hatching of the young. The incubation period is 26–30 days; The newly hatched chicks are bare and covered with some down on the head. Fledging about seven weeks. Sexual maturity attains only after at least 2 years. Known to have lived over nine years in wild.
Oriental Darter is distributed in tropical South Asia and Southeast Asia.
In IUCN Global Red list, the bird is included under ’Near Threatened’.

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