Snail kites hunt in summer shallows
June 11, 2026
The wetlands around Mérida shimmer in the late morning heat, shallow pools scattered between stands of cattail and sedge. Water levels have risen with the summer rains, flooding the margins where apple snails cluster on submerged stems. If you are walking near water today, listen for the splash of a large bird dropping to the surface.A snail kite hangs motionless above the marsh, slate-gray wings spread wide against the white sky. This threatened raptor has shaped its entire existence around one prey: the apple snail. The kite's bill curves into a sharp hook, designed precisely to extract snails from their shells. Its talons grip differently than other raptors, holding the rounded shell steady while the specialized bill works. When the kite spots movement below, it drops with controlled precision, feet first into the water.Apple snails surface to breathe through a tube-like siphon, making them visible to hunting kites. During summer, these large freshwater snails reproduce rapidly in the warm, oxygen-rich shallows. The snails scrape algae from plant stems and filter particles from the water column, converting plant matter into protein that feeds not only snail kites but also limpkins, which probe the mud with their long bills for the same prey. The kites follow water levels closely. When summer rains flood new areas, snail populations expand, and the kites adjust their hunting territories accordingly. A single kite may cover several square kilometers, moving between productive pools as conditions change.The kite that just landed carries its catch to a nearby perch, often a dead snag or the top of a palm. Here it performs the delicate work of extraction, using its bill tip to sever the muscle that holds the snail in its shell. The empty shells accumulate below favored perches, white spirals scattered on the ground like discarded pottery. Young kites must learn this technique through practice. Parents bring whole snails to the nest, and juveniles spend weeks mastering the precise movements needed to access their only food source. This specialization makes snail kites vulnerable to habitat changes, but it also makes them supremely efficient hunters when conditions are right.The water stills after the kite's departure, rings spreading outward from where it touched down. Somewhere in the shallows, another snail extends its siphon toward the surface, and overhead, another kite begins its patient circle through the humid air.
Milk frogs calling through summer nights
June 26, 2026
After dark in Mérida, when the heat of the day finally softens and the air thickens with humidity, the city's trees become something else entirely. The rains have arrived. Standing water collects in tree hollows, in bromeliads, in the gaps between roots. This is what the milk frog has been waiting for.Milk frogs are large, pale, and built for the canopy. An adult is broad-headed and heavy-bodied, with adhesive toe pads that let it move across bark and leaf surfaces with ease. The skin is smooth and whitish, sometimes faintly mottled, and the eyes are large and gold-rimmed. During the dry months they are quiet and largely invisible, sheltering in tree cavities and waiting. But when the summer rains saturate the Yucatan Peninsula and water gathers in elevated pools, the frogs descend from their retreats and begin to call. The sound is loud and repetitive, a low resonant honk that carries well through dense vegetation. A calling male stations himself near a water-filled hollow and calls through the night, sometimes for hours. Other males respond. The result, on a good rainy night, is a layered chorus that bounces off walls and canopy alike.The vocalization does two things at once. It draws females, who select mates based on call quality and persistence, and it signals other males about occupied space. Males that approach too closely trigger escalating call exchanges, sometimes followed by physical contact. Females move through this acoustic field and eventually approach a male at the water source. Eggs are laid directly onto the surface of the water pooled in the hollow, and the male fertilizes them there. The hollow matters: it protects the eggs from the kind of predation that ground-level clutches face, and the enclosed space keeps humidity high around the developing embryos. Tadpoles hatch and develop in the same water column, feeding on algae and organic debris that accumulates in the hollow. In a tree cavity with enough volume and shade, a clutch can develop through to metamorphosis in a few weeks.The milk frog's reliance on arboreal water means it is sensitive to the availability of large, mature trees. Old-growth trees develop the deep cavities and structural irregularities that hold standing water; younger, smoother trees rarely do. In and around Mérida, that means the frog is concentrated in older parks, established neighborhoods with large shade trees, and patches of remnant forest. It shares some of this space with the invasive greenhouse frog, a small direct-developing species that needs no standing water at all and breeds in moist soil and leaf litter. The two frogs occupy different microhabitats and don't compete directly, but the greenhouse frog's presence is a measure of how modified the surrounding landscape is. Where greenhouse frogs are common, the original structure of the habitat has changed.
