The Water-Snuffle

above: a least water-snuffle weaves its way through a vegetated stream.

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Another surviving group of burrowing soft-billed birds, somewhat closer down the line to the true elefinches but nonetheless still separated by nearly 75 million years of evolution, are two species of especially interesting aquatic birds known as water-snuffles. Though not truly allied with their land-living distant relatives of the same moniker, having diverged at least thirty million years later, they are broadly similar in their basic form; small eyes, sensitive whiskers, and acute sense of smell, differing more in their habits: water-snuffles, as their name suggests, are adapted to find food underwater and have become excellent swimmers, with their hind legs situated at the end of their bodies and evolved into large paddles. The nostrils are born on short extendible stalks, akin to the earliest trunks of the elefinches but likely independently developed; they serve to allow the animal to surface and breathe without fully emersing its head.

Water-snuffles exhibit the same mobile snouts and a fan of finger-like fleshy appendages at the tip as the early elefinches, having diverged later than the terrestrial snuffles. As in their ancestors, these improve their sensitivity to hidden prey buried in the mud and are able to feel around to detect buried prey items which, once discovered, are quickly gulped down whole; even the shells of armored molluscs are broken down in the gizzard through the aid of gastroliths. Water-snuffles still rest and raise their young in burrows, and retain sharp claws with which to dig them, usually dug into a riverbank and opening only underwater to protect them from terrestrial predators. Propelling themselves with large webbed feet and digging out worms and shellfish from the sediment at the bottoms of the Kyran's freshwater rivers and lakes, the water-snuffles have evolved into something very much like a truly avian analog to Earth's platypus.

The two living species, the least and the greater water-snuffle, are distinguished mainly by their preferred habitats. The more abundant least water-snuffle, an animal around the size of a mallard, is most often found in slow-moving ponds and streams choked with water plants. Its eyes are small and it feeds on a wide variety of aquatic insects and crustaceans as well as molluscs, which it is particularly adapted to handle with a wide gape and large, muscular gizzard. Greater water-snuffles, which are marginally larger, prefer fast-flowing, clear bodies of water and feed mainly on benthic fishes and crustaceans such as shrimp, both of which are usually pursued rather than dug out from the sediment. Their eyesight is thus better than that of the lesser species and the tendrils on the snout are shorter and thicker.