Tag: Metopidius indicus

Bronze-winged Jacana: bird of the week IX

In my dreams of retirement I sit by a fish-filled pond watching bronze-winged jacanas (Metopidius indicus) stepping daintily over lily pads to peck at insects, sloppily enough to add vegetable fiber to their diets. These dreams are broken only by memories of mosquitoes and other biting insects. Unmistakable in appearance, these are birds that you can see them from west of the Thar desert in India down south-east Asia to Vietnam and Malayasia, till the open waters stop them. Interestingly, the females are polyandrous, but the males are territorial. I watched this one forage in Mangalajodi, and got a photo as it had one leg in the air. You can see the adaptation of its toes: very long, to enable it to step on lotus leaves without capsizing.

There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. There is no compulsion to post a recent photo, but it would help others to know when and where you saw the bird. You might consider using the tag “Bird of the Week” in case people search for old posts using it. I hope you’ve had the time to look at what others have added this week and in the previous weeks.

Please bear with my delays in responding to your comments this week. I’m travelling outside my usual time zone, and things are a little topsy turvy.

Bird of the Week VIII

Rosy Pelican

Once upon a time the Rosy Pelican beer was quite common. I would look at the very rosy pelican on the label and wonder about the bird. It didn’t occur to me then that one did not have to travel far to see those birds. There was an attempt to revive the beer again in the early years of this century before it followed the Dodo into oblivion. I was reminded of this old favourite amongst lagers as I stood by the ponds of Bharatpur’s Keoladeo National Park and watched flocks of Rosy Pelicans (aka Great White Pelicans, Pelecanus onocrotalus)

Unlike the very similar looking Dalmatian Pelican, the Rosy Pelican is not a loner. Apart from the fact that they are gregarious, I eventually found that the easiest way to tell them apart is to look at the eyes. The Rosy has a large pink patch around the eyes, as you can see in these photos, whereas the Dalmatian has round yellow eyes and no eye patch. In size they seemed about similar. The bills are also similar (except that the Dalmatian’s may be more orange in colour than that of the Rosy). The Rosy Pelican is named for the yellowish or pinkish feathers of the neck and breast, a feature which I found needs mellow light to see clearly. The really major difference is that the Rosy Pelican is one of the decreasing number of species which are not yet endangered.

Earlier in the day I’d seen a solitary pelican foraging in a body of water, accompanied by a Bronze-winged Jacana (Metopidius indicus). It seems that Pelicans catch more fish with less effort when they are alone, but, paradoxically, prefer to be in large flocks. In their breeding grounds in Africa, Pelicans may take 10-25% of the stocks of fish in lakes, setting up potential conflict with humans. The rosy colour of the neck feathers apparently comes from ferric oxide in the silt in its African habitats. This may partly explain why the individuals I saw had paler feathers than in the stock photos one sees. The label on the beer bottle definitely took artistic license with reality.

These birds are good fliers, migrating every year from their main breeding grounds in Africa to winter in India, stopping to feed multiple times on the way. When you see them on the wing, they seem to glide effortlessly, moving their wings with great economy. On our last evening in Bharatpur, as we passed the huge marsh where I’d seen Cheetal and Pelicans foraging together I had the exciting view of a flock of Rosy Pelicans taking off. As they fly, the black edges of the wings can be seen clearly. When the wings are folded, these black primary feathers are hidden under the whites of the remainder of the wing. They took off with great flaps of their wings, but once they leveled off in flight, I was impressed by the elegant economy of their motion.