DAY 288: PROWLING LIKE A DINOSAUR!

 JAMES OCHSE:

 PURPLE SWAMPHEN 








This chicken-sized bird is a common resident in reed beds, marshes and flooded grasslands. With its large red feet, bright blue plumage and red bill and frontal shield, it is easy to recognize and distinguish from any other birds in the field. 
 
According to Peter Hancock, the Australian Swamphen prowls like a dinosaur!

Striding like a miniature tyrannosaurus across wetland pastures, the purple swamphen with its heavy red beak and iridescent blue chest is a strikingly handsome bird. Known to the Noongar as "Mulal", the swamphen is larger than its cousins the coot and dusky moorhen and common in wetlands from Europe to Australia, including Africa.

In the metro area it congregates in flocks of up to 30 birds to patrol lakesides and riverbanks for its food, but while it enjoys a varied diet of herbs, seeds, fruit, eggs, insects, spiders, crustaceans and molluscs, its main sustenance is derived from the stems of young bulrushes and reeds. Watching a swamphen eat is a comical sight as it awkwardly clasps its food in long-fingered claws designed for walking on floating reeds.


Though tame in spots where people regularly feed waterbirds, in its natural state the swamphen is a shy and secretive bird, skulking in reed beds and only betraying its presence with its loud screeching cries. Swamphens often trample rushes into feeding platforms which can be identified by piles of food scraps, such as marron shells.

In the Perth area the swamphen breeds from mid-July to November – and it's a real family affair.
The entire flock builds a platform of rushes and grass with stems drawn over it to form a canopy, and in this single nest several females lay their sandy-coloured eggs, which are splotched with chestnut and grey.  The flock also constructs a nursery nest in which the chicks are brooded at night and from which they are led to forage by day, usually by adults at the lower end of the pecking order.