All species › Cranes, rails and allies › Rails and crakes › Western Swamphen
Western Swamphen | Porphyrio porphyrio
Purperkoet | Calamón común | Purpurhuhn | פורפיריה מערבית | Talève sultane
A rail the size of a chicken: deep blue-purple, with a bill like a red wedge and long legs. By the mid-twentieth century only a handful remained on the Iberian Peninsula, crowded into the marshes of the Guadalquivir; it now walks the rice fields of the Ebro delta and has reached the Camargue.
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Voice
Loud and hardly bird-like. A harsh, nasal trumpeting that falls away in pitch, koo-aah, mixed with groaning and a tinny chak. It carries hundreds of metres across a reedbed and is usually the first proof the species is present. Most vocal at dusk and through the spring.
Recording: Joost van Bruggen — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Big and heavy, uniformly blue-purple, with a deep blue breast and neck and a duskier back. The bill is a scarlet wedge running up into a broad red frontal shield; the legs are flesh-red with large toes, used to lift food to the bill. A clean white patch under the tail flicks with every step. Juveniles are dull grey with a dark bill and only slowly acquire the purple.
Confusion species
In Europe there is little to confuse it with: Coot is black with a white shield, Moorhen half the size and olive-brown. At range in reeds only the silhouette misleads. Watch instead for birds of other swamphen taxa, such as Grey-Headed Swamphen with its grey head and neck; these have generally been treated as separate species since 2015 and appear in Europe as escapes. European birds belong to the taxon porphyrio.
Habitat
Permanent shallow fresh water with dense marginal growth: reed, reedmace, sedge and papyrus around lagoons and marismas (tidal marshes of the Guadalquivir estuary, partly saline), plus rice paddies, irrigation canals, gravel pits and reservoir margins. Feeds walking over floating vegetation and along the reed edge, often in full view in the first light of the morning.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Breeds on the Iberian Peninsula, Sardinia, Sicily, north-west Africa and parts of Anatolia. The Iberian Peninsula holds the bulk: Doñana and the Guadalquivir marismas are the historical core, from where protection and reintroductions carried the species to El Hondo and the Valencian lagoons, the Albufera, and since the 1990s the Ebro delta and the Empordà; it also breeds in the Balearics, with s'Albufera de Mallorca as a stronghold. From Catalonia it has moved north into the Languedoc and the Camargue.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
March or April in Doñana, El Hondo or the Albufera de València, sitting at a reedbed edge at sunrise. The birds climb the stems to bite off seed heads and stay in view for half an hour or so. Use your ears first — the trumpeting gives them away long before you see anything.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened (IUCN: Least Concern). A strong recovery in southern Europe. Hunting bans, protection of the last marshes and a run of reintroductions brought a strong increase, and the spread along the Mediterranean coast continues. Drying wetlands, reed cutting and burning during the breeding season, and lead and pesticide loads in rice-growing areas remain the risks.
Scientific name
Porphyrio porphyrio | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Fulica porphyrio; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Porphyrio was introduced in 1760 by Brisson. Porphyrio is Latin, from the Greek porphuriōn, the classical authors' name for the swamphen, from porphura 'purple'. The specific epithet repeats the genus name. The specimen the first description was based on came from the lands around the western Mediterranean.