In search of the platypus and other paradoxes: Changaram wetlands, Kerala, India

Today we visited the wonderful Changaram wetlands just south of Kochi. What a place it is, masses of birds on the lilypad covered flooded fields, with people working waist deep in the water, a really evocative scene. One of the many highlights was the large numbers of cotton pygmy geese, a delightful little duck which I have seen before near Brisbane, but not as well or in such numbers.

Other species included lesser whistling ducks, 100 garganey, stork-billed kingfisher, red-wattled lapwing, oriental darter, Indian cormorant, ashy woodswallow, blue-tailed bee-eaters, grey-headed swamphens, ashy prinia, pheasant-tailed jacana (unfortunately in non-breeding plumage), bronze-winged jacana, clamerous reed warbler, brown-headed gull, black-winged stilts, spot-billed pelican and various egrets and herons such as intermediate egret and purple heron.

Brahminy kites are just everywhere, often 40 or 50 in the sky at any one time. Even in the heart of the city of Kochi you can see them overhead.

Cotton pygmy geese Nettapus coromandelianus are the smallest of all wildfowl, smaller even than teal. They are true ducks and not geese, despite their name and looks. Actually this is a different race to those I have seen in Brisbane which are sometime called Australian pygmy goose N.c. albipennis. Perhaps unsurprisingly these birds in India are sometimes known as Indian pygmy goose N.c. coromandelianus, though their range does extend into south east Asia. In Australia I also saw another species, green pygmy goose.

You really can see how small these cotton pygmy geese are when you realise that on the extreme right of this photo there are two garganey which look bigger and stockier.

Cotton pygmy geese.

We asked a couple of these people what they were doing and apparently they were gathering food for the cattle, though the cattle themselves were often deep in the water and seemed well capable of getting food without help.

I remember as if it was yesterday the excitement of seeing my first purple gallinule at Ludo Lagoon on the Algarve, Portugal in 1992. I got up at first light and drove to a rickety hide on stilts overlooking a lagoon surrounded by reeds in the middle of Ria Formosa. To get into the hide I had to climb up a metal ladder and then enter through a trap door and I could feel the hide swaying as I entered it. On closing the trap door and opening the window I found that there was a mist over the lagoon which was packed with coots, gadwall and mallard and suddenly I saw a large dark bird fly across the water and crash into the reeds on the other side. Later I saw another eating reeds by holding them in its ridiculous feet. At the time that seemed a remarkable sighting of a species which I thought of as the holy grail of European birding, and a bird which I thought would be very skulking and difficult to see. Two days later that myth was exploded when I found another three walking on the greens of a golf course at Vilamoura, and ever since then I've done very well for the species, even seeing one in the UK in 2016.

The hide at Ludo is sadly now long gone and I don't imagine that anybody goes there these days specifically for purple gallinule because they can be seen far more easily in many other places. Even the name purple gallinule has gone, it's been split into several species with western swamphen now the preferred name for the European birds. In Australia and New Zealand I've seen many Australian swamphens, which are also known as Pukeko in Moari.

So today it was great to catch up with a third species of "purple gallinule", grey-headed swamphen, in a location which if anything is even more evocative than Ludo. This species occurs throughout India and south-east Asia, but also the Middle East and indeed I saw grey-headed swamphen in Kuwait a few days ago.

Grey-headed swamphen has itself been split into three races with those in India Porphyrio poliocephalus poliocephalus. The birds I saw in Kuwait were a different race, P. p. seistanicus.

Blue-tailed bee-eater.

Bronze-winged jacana.

Brown-headed gulls, in many ways very similar to black-headed gulls except note that the wing pattern is very different in the flying adult on the right of the photo. Black-headed gulls do occur in India, and in fact there's one on the extreme right of the standing birds in this photograph. See how much smaller it is.