Sean pointed out a laughing falcon on a snag above the river, and a bat falcon catching dragonflies looked like a pint-sized peregrine, its white collar glowing in the late sun. But the Rewa’s most obvious avian residents were its fishing birds: kingfishers and herons, gull-winged ospreys, black skimmers and swallow-tailed kites, whose parabolic flight was almost absurdly graceful. Strangest of all were the sinuous relatives of cormorants called anhingas or snakebirds, which pace along the river bottom spearing fish on needle-sharp bills. They leaped from low branches into the water at our
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