When a family member tends towards corpulence, it hardly registers in the mind till their drapes start bursting, the buttons flying with the muzzle velocity of a firearm. Equating resident birds with the next-of-kin, birders are beginning to notice that the Perumbakkam wetland is bursting at the seams with familiar, resident jacanas.
On the southernand northern extremities of the wetland, water has drained hugely and noticeably — respectively — exposing vegetation the pheasant-tailed and bronze-winged jacanas take to, with their never-ending jacanidae toes. They are making the most of it — particularly the pheasant-tailed jacana.
A bronze winged jacana at the Perumbakkam wetland on December 24, 2021. Photo: Prince Frederick
Not many days ago, when birder Gnanaskandan Keshavabharathi scanned the expanse, mumbling numbers, his tally of pheasant-tailed jacanas stood somewhere around 200. He had also counted nearly a dozen bronze-winged jacanas. Counting independently on another day, birder Sundaravel Palanivel’s arrived at a guesstimate: a whopping 400 jacanas with much of that number being racked up by the pheasant-tailed jacanas.
Either way, the jacana presence is monstrously high. Juveniles, particularly of the pheasant-tailed, make up a neat percentage of the gathering. There are also pheasant-tailed togged in their delectable breeding colours and extended sickle.
A stray thought enters the frame, altering the picture. Having guzzled water through November, the Perumbakkam wetland is now somewhat akin to a lung whose fluid build-up is being cleared slowly. The draining ismassively incomplete with the central sections of the wetland still retaining pools of water.
- V Santharam, ornithologist and director of the Institute of Bird Studies at Rishi Valley, recalls how jacanas ruled the roost at two jheels in North Chennai — back then, North Madras. “In the 1980s, we used to go to the Manali and Madhavaram jheels (famously known as the twin jheels). we used to access it from the Manali side. I do not remember the bus route — we used to take that bus from Burma Bazaar and it will drop us right at the village, and from there, we would walk about 200 metres and we would reach this place. We used to go through the village and then go into a mango orchard. There would be the shallow waters in front of us, full of lotus leaves — we used to count, most of time, 150 to 200 jacanas. And together, these jheels would be just one-tenth the size of the Perumbakkam wetland.”
Ornithologist V Santharam notes that this could be a temporary phenomenon resulting from cramped lodgings. Once the water recedes from the other parts, and the wetland gets more accessible to them, the jacanas would be more spread out. When that happens, the sense of mammoth presence would also diminish.
It could well be that the jacanas had been present earlier too in such impressive numbers, but were never shoehorned into small spaces with favourable vegetation.
The ornithologist brings yet another perspective to the jacana-dominated picture. “Congregations of jacanas are not unusual. If they have juveniles now, they must have finished their breeding a little earlier. They probably have different breeding schedules. May be post-breeding, they are congregating at a place that is relatively safe and they have enough food.”
Among the many things that stand out in the tightly-packed congregations of pheasant-tailed jacanas is cantankerous infighting. Every other second, two jacanas would go up in a flurry of quarrelsome and unruly feathers.
Santharam explains: “They defend small territories within which they can enjoy exclusive feeding rights. I have seen this with rails and coots — they also have a strong territorial instinct. In contrast, waders are migratory; they come here and find the food to be abundant and they go about their business quietly. These resident birds are more specialised in their feeding, looking for things in vegetation, and it is not an easy kind of food to access, and probably, they need to have some space to themselves.”
