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Allen's Gallinule | Porphyrio alleni
Afrikaans purperhoen | Calamón de Allen
Allen's Gallinule is a small, colourful gallinule with a purple-blue head and neck, a green back and a red bill. It moves with the rains to newly flooded floodplains and marshes, where it is locally conspicuous before becoming almost impossible to find again.
Voice
A series of fast, hard, barking notes, dook-dook-dook or kek-kek-kek, and a high nasal keek. When excited a sharp cackle. Mostly heard in the early morning and at dusk.
Recording: Mike Nelson — CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
About 25 cm, slim with long toes. Head, neck and underparts are deep purple-blue, the head almost black; back and wings are olive to bronze-green. The undertail is white with a black centre and shows when the bird flicks its tail. The bill is bright red; the frontal shield is turquoise to cobalt blue in the breeding male and greenish in the female. The eye and legs are red. Juveniles are buff-brown with scaly upperparts, a pale belly and a brownish bill, and lack the blue tones.
Confusion species
The Purple Swamphen (Porphyrio porphyrio) is almost twice the size, with a massive red bill and a red shield. The Purple Gallinule (Porphyrio martinica) is larger, with a red bill tipped yellow, a pale blue shield and yellow legs; juveniles of the two species are similar, but the American bird has yellow rather than pinkish or reddish-brown legs. Juvenile Allen's Gallinules can be confused with juvenile Lesser Moorhens (Paragallinula angulata), which are greyer, with a white flank line and a yellowish bill.
Habitat
Dense, shallow freshwater marshes and seasonally flooded floodplains with floating vegetation such as water lilies, and with reeds, sedges and flooded grass; also rice fields and dams with plenty of fringing vegetation. It walks over floating plants and clambers in reeds. It eats seeds, young shoots and aquatic insects.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
In the rainy season mainly in the north and east of the region: Angola, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, the Okavango and Chobe in Botswana and the Zambezi Region of Namibia; in South Africa scarce in the east (KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Limpopo) and a vagrant further south and west. Beyond the region across much of sub-Saharan Africa and on Madagascar.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In wet summers, December to March, search water-lily beds and flooded grass on floodplains, for example in the Okavango and along the Zambezi. Birds are best seen early in the morning, when they walk out of cover over lily pads flicking their tails.
Conservation status
Not threatened and locally common in good rain years. Its presence depends strongly on the flooding of floodplains; loss of seasonal marshes and river regulation by dams degrade its habitat.
Scientific name
Porphyrio alleni | Thomson, 1842
Thomson described the species in 1842 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. 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'. alleni honours the British naval officer William Allen (1792–1864). The specimen the first description was based on came from Idah on the Niger River.