Black Skimmer

Highly gregarious and ultra-cool, a squadron of Black Skimmers rests on a Florida sandbar.

At ease, skimmers look like grounded F-14 fighter jets. When the pack takes to the air, they are transformed into a gracefully coordinated body of long-winged birds that commands one's eye. Moving in sinuous columns, the skimmers put on quite the airshow.

When seen up close, a Black Skimmer takes on a comical appearance, what with the orange-based Bozo bill. They also look faintly thuggish; like an avian tough wearing a black hoodie pulled low over the eyes.

Hold your thumb over the bill and temporarily block it from view, and the bird looks long, sleek, and ternlike. Expose the bill, and the skimmer takes on an undeniably odd and amusing look. It's as if its beak is deformed. But it isn't - the skimmer offers evidence of the miraculous possibilities wrought by fits and spurts of evolution; how forces of selection can shape such strange-looking features that are so beautifully functional.

A Black Skimmer's normal working environment: inches off the water. This one appears to be scolding its reflection in a fishy backwater marsh. Agile and adept at close-quarter high-speed flight operations, skimmers swoosh low over the deck like barn-storming feathered crop dusters.

And here's how they get the skimmer tag. Swooshing towards the water in a graceful descent, the Black Skimmer gently lowers that elongated lower mandible into the water and slices a long wake.

Why?

Fish. In an amazing show of aeronautics, reaction time, and coordination, the skimmer sluices along, hoping to come into contact with a minnow or other small aquatic animal. When contact is made, it snaps that powerful thick bill shut in a nanosecond and secures a meal.

Pretty amazing stuff.