An excerpt from naturalist Bradford Torrey’s 1895 book, A Florida Sketch-Book:
“At another time, on the same stake, sat some dark, strange-looking object. 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. I drew nearer and nearer, and meanwhile it turned squarely about,—a slow and ticklish operation,—so that its back was presented to the sun; as if it had dried one side of its wings and tail,—for the latter, too, was fully spread,—and now would dry the other. There for some time it sat preening its feathers, with monstrous twistings and untwistings of its snaky neck. If the chat is a clown, the water turkey would make its fortune as a contortionist. Finally it rose, circled about till it got well aloft, and then, setting its wings, sailed away southward and vanished.”
– Torrey, Bradford. “Chapter 10: “Walks About Tallahassee”.” A Florida Sketch-Book.
- iNaturalist observation: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/33744515
- Torrey, Bradford. A Florida Sketch-Book. Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1894. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59608/pg59608-images.html
Okefenokee Photography Project by William Wise 