American Colonist : Grey - Headed Swamphen

South Andaman

The first one I saw was about chicken sized, with Hornbill like red adornments just on the forehead (not made of bone). His whole body was bright, confetti coloured in a colour gradient going from white to black (Females have more blue and less white) with bright blues and purples in between and he was in the water, happily wading away like a duck. I don’t think I’d seen any creatures in blue before that. My reaction obviously was. “Blue ! Ye Kya Hai Bhai?” (Blue ! What is this, bro?). That’s how I met the Grey-Headed Swamphen. Oh yeah ! Red eyes on top of that, which I just can’t get enough of.

They’re not difficult to photograph themselves, but light falling on all those colours helps big time as you can see in the pictures which are from two different sightings (Pics : 11 -12). Being closer would also help a lot but from what I was told, they prefer to be close to the water or in it and are pretty shy of close proximity to humans. As far as I was concerned, I was in no way wading into that with my cherished kit over any hen, more so in my condition. So the side of the road had to do and I think it did fine although I do have a few ideas about how to deal with water birds next time when my hip’s hopefully better.

You heard of Australia’s Emu War and how the animals won when the government quit in 1932? Well, these guys who range usually from Vietnam, through India to the Middle East were taken to the US as novelty pieces to be bred and sold as domestic pets, being so pretty and all. They got free in the 1990’s there. Biologists and organizations tried to eradicate them for fear of their effect on the local environment and guess what? By 2013 they had been included in the bird’s checklist for Florida. They successfully out bred the eradication and colonized the US and there was nothing to be done about that but bear the consequences. A few thousand died but these birds have pulled off what no human probably ever can as far as immigration is concerned. To think that this happened in 1990s is ridiculous and so funny. People just don’t learn do they? They still won’t clean their shoes before an international flight and they want exotic pets that they will discard later. There’s shops selling African parrots in Guwahati right now in a pet store near my house. People just don’t learn that every animal does not have pet qualities like a cat or dog. Don’t even get me started on people who keep Burmese pythons in their homes. Oh there’s another species that’s now free in Florida where our swamp hens relocated to as well just this one could eat you whole to get free. Cause they are Wild, you people. They want to be Free ! Not be Domestic.

So much of what we want as people, as animals is in our system, hard wired in our dna, our source code or whatever you want to call it. To want to take any creature away from that is trying to take away its essence. We’ve all seen what happened to human populations where the children were taken from their parents. So why would it be different for birds and animals? The Jackal turned to the Dog cause it wanted to and over two and a half million years. Doesn’t mean that the swamphen would turn to a chicken overnight just cause we wanted it to.

It’s just sad that even educated and well read people forget the basic difference between wild and domestic animals that they were taught in school cause for every so called success story of survival of an alien species in a foreign land like the one of the Grey – Headed Swamphen and Burmese Python, there’s the flip side of their negative impact on the local environment. and thousands of stories of species that just did not make it after abandonment on relocation to a new environment.

Living things are not possessions. They can be friends if they choose but never possessions. Sadly, we have not yet evolved enough to accept that even now.