In Indira Priyadarshini Nagar which adjoins each side of the highway main to Global Hospitals in Perumbakkam, Chennai, layouts are dotted with vacant plots as a lot as buildings. The buildings show indicators of human civilisation, and the vacant plots bear the insignia of Nature, uncooked and defenceless. Walk down any of these cross streets and also you may luck into avian households.
The species to be discovered are the purple moorhen, bronze-winged jacana, white-breasted waterhen, pheasant-tailed jacana (in uncommon patches) and the frequent moorhen.
A Common moorhen chick at Indira Priyadarshini Nagar in Perumbakkam on July 25, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
PRINCE FREDERICK
Water-filled plots supporting Avian life are a characteristic of residential layouts adjoining to Pallikaranai marsh and Perumbakkam wetland (which in truth is taken into account a part of Pallikaranai marsh). In Karapakkam, a structure (River View Residency) this nature exists. In Perumbakkam, one has Indira Priyadarshini Nagar.
Currently, in a boggy vacant land on the finish of Sixth Cross Street, one will stumble upon a young family of Common moorhens. After nightfall one may miss a lot of the family — the young members of the family — as they will mix effortlessly into the enveloping darkness.
A standard moorhen (Gallinula chloropus) allopreens its young one at Indira Priyadarshini Nagar in Perumbakkam on July 25, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
PRINCE FREDERICK
With downy black feathers, Moorhen chicks look aerial and even when the digicam has captured their frames in sharp focus, they might look pixelated. They inhabit the unreal from the get-go, arriving firm-footed at the same time as they crackle out of the eggs. And these little ones positive know the way to run for canopy. At the slightest intimation of any intrusive presence, they dash to their mother and father’ protecting facet with a pace that suggests fairy mud has been sprinkled on them.
In these boggy, water-filled patches, apart from bulrushes, there may be sufficient duckweed and different floating vegetation that flip the digestive juices inside these birds. Among the traits of the frequent moorhen is how the mother and father deign to feed the chicks until they really feel a sense of surfeit. This is fascinating because the chicks are recognized to be gregarious feeders and precocious sufficient to fend for themselves. Recently, when this author had a look-in at this patch, a mother or father was being extraordinarily doting: it was allopreening three of the chicks, one after the opposite. It was fairly a packed family with eight chicks round to be counted. The different mother or father was lacking from the scene. Both mother and father share the accountability of elevating the young.
