Aardvarks to Zorillas - Anything goes

  This is a Greater Coucal — chembothu , in Tamil — in my compound in Chennai. Black hood, deep chestnut wings, a long clumsy tail; a bird that would rather clamber than fly. I photographed it this week with something dark clamped in its bill. I have watched these birds for years, and for most of those years they walked past one particular thing on the ground as if it were furniture. This week, one was eating it. The thing it was eating — or one very like it — is the Giant African Snail. If you garden in this city you know the snail, even if you never knew its name: Lissachatina fulica (the older books call it Achatina fulica ). It is not a Chennai problem, or even an Indian one. It is one of the planet's most successful invaders, established in more than fifty countries — and almost none of that travel was its own doing. It is native to a thin strip of coastal East Africa. Everything after that was us. Naturalists carried it to India around 1847. It moved on through cargo hol...