This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we have the under-bite champion of the bird world: the Black Skimmer (Ryhnchops niger).
Black Skimmers are a slender member of the same family as Gulls and Terns, Laridae. Black Skimmers are a bird of monochrome pelage with a jet-black back and ice-white belly. This formal coat is accented by legs and bill of deep-orange. Their general body shape is sleek and narrow, much like a tern, but what stands them out from the crowd of sea birds is their beak. Black Skimmers have a long, blade-like bill that’s orange at the base and black towards the tip. What’s unusual is that their lower bill is nearly 50% longer than the upper, blunt like a butter knife at the tip, and thin as wire the whole length. The design is somewhere between sword and airplane wing. The upper bill is similarly strange yet less by comparison. This beak is the key to the Black Skimmer’s feeding strategy.
Black Skimmers are piscivorous. However, instead of plunge diving like a Tern or Pelican for their meals, they prefer to stay out of the surf. Black Skimmer fly flat, true, and swiftly mere inches over the surface of the water. As one levels out it opens wide to lower its rudder beak into the brine. That hydrodynamic shape divides the water as cleanly as the bow of a ship as the bird coasts over a creek. Its long elegant wings power the craft and steer it towards a disturbance in the surface of the water. Fast and silent they ambush their target blind. Their bladed bill broadsides a Killifish at breakneck speed. The scaly thing is wrenched upward on the inclined maw and fatally pinched between two scissor-like jaws. Black Skimmers feed not by sight but by touch, much like a Stork or Spoonbill, but in a much more thrilling manner. They’re common in coastal waterways where small fish school near the surface and they often rest perched on the beach.
