Earth Almanac: March/April 2007

Screams in the Night

The swamps of Georgia, Florida, and South and Central America are spooky, magical places in any season but especially when breeding limpkins—a.k.a. “crying birds”—fill the night with their caterwauling. Shrieking like actresses auditioning for Psycho, males charge one another in mock combat. The cacophony is a sure sign that the rivers have stopped rising, or so aver the people of Amazonia. Much remains to be learned about this strange, goose-size bird seemingly allied to rails and cranes but in a family of its own.

The long, down-curved bill often has a right bend at the tip, perhaps so that it can more easily be slipped into the right-handed chambers of apple snails, the bird’s favorite food. Although the limpkin probably derives its name from its limping gate or possibly its limping flight (characterized by jerky wing beats and dangling legs), it is a fast runner and powerful flyer. Nests—platforms of sticks, vines, moss, leaves, and other vegetation—may be constructed anywhere from high tree limbs to floating islands. Four to eight downy hatchlings leave the nest after only one day and are then tended by both parents.

A Surge of Silver

There’s a special night in early spring when cold-water streams collected by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and many of our large interior lakes snap to life with a surge of silver. Thousands of fish, rarely longer than a pencil and not a lot thicker, are moving upstream, sometimes clouding the water with eggs and milt. Rainbow smelt, resembling the salmon to which they are distantly related, fuel vast ecosystems that start with larger fish and end with piscivorous birds and mammals. Originally rainbow smelt were restricted to coastal lakes and river systems from Vancouver Island to the Northwest Territories and Labrador to New Jersey. But there have been widespread introductions, not always with happy results because, while the smelt serve as forage for favored game fish such as lake trout and walleyes, they also consume the eggs and fry of these species.

On many eastern and Great Lakes streams it is legal to catch smelts with dip nets, and smelting parties, complete with bonfires and beer, are a long-standing tradition. The smelt derives both its popular and generic name (Osmerus, Greek for “odor”) from its distinctive but not unpleasant smell, reminiscent of sliced cucumber. As table fare the rainbow smelt is excelled by few fish, a fact noted by Ogden Nash, who wrote: “Yet—take this salmon somewhere else. And bring me half a dozen smelts.”