Today I had the pleasure of reading about the African Swamphen on the De Wets Wild blog.  If you haven’t checked out the De Wets Wild blog, you really should.  Dries and his family travel to the many wilderness areas of South Africa to bring us beautiful photos of the flora and fauna of each place they visit.  Anyway, the African Swamphen (Porphyrio madagascariensis) is a sub-species of the Purple Swamphen.  The Purple Swamphen has a wide distribution across the globe, including Australia.

At Dries’ request, I’m posting a few photos I took recently of the Purple Swamphens in my area.  They are normally quite shy, but spring has emboldened some.  Do you have Purple Swamphens in your part of the world?  If so, I would love to see what they are up to.  Create a pingback to this post and share the love.

Kind Regards
Tracy

 

36 thoughts on “Purple Swamphen”

  2. Love your photos. They are all around the North Coast. I used to work on a wetland and they managed to pull out all of the reeds that were planted. Not my favourite bird. I don’t have any photos

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  10. I saw Dries post too and really enjoyed it. We have pukeko in NZ – looks like your bird. I looked up pukeko in New Zealand Birds Online and they had this info: “There are 5 recognised subspecies within the south-west Pacific swamphen; New Zealand birds are of the subspecies melanotus. The south-west Pacific swamphen forms part of a super-species cluster along with western swamphen P. porphyrio, African swamphen P. madagascariensis, grey-headed swamphen P. poliocephalus, Philippine swamphen P. pulverulentus and black-backed swamphen P. indicus ranging from the western Mediterranean through Africa and Asia to Polynesia.”

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  12. Thanks, Tracy – super interesting!

    They really are very bold to be so out in the open – those big feet alone is reason to be hiding!

    The shot of the one on the run really is exceptional! Looks like a boeing on its takeoff run!

    Thanks also for the kind words about our blog, we really appreciate you being one of our friends!

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