Pheasant-tailed Jacana (Hydrophasianus chirurgus)

Pheasant-tailed Jacana (Hydrophasianus chirurgus) is striking white and chocolate-brown rail-like water bird with enormous feet and a distinctive, long, pointed sickle-shaped tail. Both sexes are similar. In non-breeding plumage chiefly pale brown and white, with a black necklace on upper breast, and minus the long tail excluding the tail plumes, that of the Partridge. Gregariously—in non-breeding season often large flocks—on vegetation-choked tanks. The long tail bird is resident throughout the Indian Empire, Pakistan, up to about 6,000 ft. in Kashmir. Beyond, eastwards, to S. China, Philippines and Java.

This handsome Pheasant-tailed Jacana is common on every lotus or marsh-covered jheel, tank or swamp of any size. In general habits it closely resembles its Bronze-winged cousin, except perhaps that it keeps more to the open and is less skulking. While strictly resident, the birds are forced to move about a good deal locally, as the waters they inhabit gradually dry up in summer. Its enormous toes are admirably adapted for a life on floating aquatic vegetation. They help to distribute the weight of the bird over a large area, so that it can run over the most lightly floating leaf without producing a ripple.

In the non-breeding season these Jacanas collect in flocks of as many as 40 to 100 birds, and their peculiar nasal mewing calls — tewn, tewn, etc.—uttered as the birds rise in the air with a flash of their white wings and make off on alarm, is a familiar sound to everyone who has shot duck on an Indian jheel (lake) in winter. At rest their coloration at this season is obliterate in their native environment of dry floating water-lily stems and leaves.

Its diet consists of vegetable matter as well as insects and molluscs. This species possesses a strong sharp spur at the bend of the wing which is used as a weapon of offense. During the breeding season, the birds indulge in a great deal of mostly innocuous scrapping.

Nesting: The season is during the summer monsoon, principally June to September. The nest is a pad of rushes, etc., as of the Bronze-winged Jacana, placed on floating vegetation. Sometimes floating rafts of dry weeds and herbage are made, while occasionally the eggs are even laid on bare lotus or singara leaves, partially submerged in water. The normal clutch consists of 4 peg-top shaped eggs, glossy greenish-bronze or rufous-brown in color, unmarked.

Apparently, the female alone incubates. When disturbed or suspicious the bird transfers the clutch bodily from one spot to another a few yards away, pressing each egg with the bill against her breast, crouching, walking backwards and almost dragging it over the floating leaves. The eggs of the Pheasant-tailed Jacana, often laid directly upon floating singdra (Trapa) leaves, resemble the surrounding olive-brown vegetation so closely as to be completely obliterated from view.

Read More – Comb-crested Jacana (Irediparra gallinacea)