The Pheasant-tailed Jacana
With their long feet and toes, Jacanas are built to walk on floating vegetation and have quite specific habitat requirements, ideally ponds with water lilies or similar plants on which to walk. Formerly there were many such ponds in the New Territories and Pheasant-tailed Jacanas (水雉 'water pheasant', Hydrophasianus chirurgus) bred around Mai Po until the 1970s. Since then, Jacanas have occurred mostly on passage, typically stopping over in wetlands such as Mai Po and Long Valley in May.
In order to tempt the birds back to breed, an ideal Jacana habitat has been created at the Lok Ma Chau wetlands. Visible from the Lok Ma Chau MTR platform, the lily pond is part of a mitigation project to compensate for the loss of wetland to make room for the new rail connection. But the habitat is small, and the Jacanas first have to find it. This year a bird has instead taken up residence in the unlikely setting of the Cyberport on Hong Kong Island, which has an artificial lake at its centre. The two levels of the lake are separated by a concrete structure, effectively forming a catwalk on which the Jacana has been strutting, to the delight of the assembled photographers.
Let us hope the Jacanas eventually return to breed in more suitable habitat. Like Greater Painted-snipes, female Pheasant-tailed Jacanas are polyandrous, keeping a harem of males to whom they delegate the childcare.
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