“A spiky iguana looks positively punk in the company of tuxedoed stilts. As the dry season wrings ever more moisture from the llanos [the vast grasslands of Venezuela’s interior], creatures congregate at shrinking pools that concentrate fish and freshwater shrimp and set a banquet for waterbirds.”
The Black-necked Stilt (Himantopus mexicanus) is a locally abundant resident of American wetlands and coastlines, from the coastal areas of California, much of the interior western United States and along the Gulf of Mexico as far east as Florida, then south to Peru, northern Brazil and the Galapagos islands. Northern populations are migratory, wintering from the extreme south of the USA to southern Mexico, rarely as far south as Costa Rica
