Carolina moose
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Carolina moorhen ( Porzana carolina ) |
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| Porzana carolina | ||||||||||
| ( Linnaeus , 1758) |
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The Carolina moorhen ( Porzana carolina ) is a species of bird from the Rallen family within the order of the crane birds . It is common in North and South America, but rarely comes to Europe. A protonym of the scientific name is Rallus carolinus .
features
The Carolina moorhen is typical of the genus Porzana , round and plump physique. It reaches a body length of 18 to 21 centimeters. The wings are short and wide. The tail is short, wedge-shaped and evenly tapering. The strong, gray-yellow to green-yellow colored legs have three long toes pointing forward and one, compared to the others, short, thin toe pointing backwards. The color of the beak, which is yellow to yellow-orange at the base and has a strong, pointed beak, changes to a greenish yellow-brown towards the front. The beak is similar to that of the spotted moorhen , but it is a little longer, extends further up onto the forehead and tapers in front. The nostrils are slit-shaped and lie in the middle of the upper bill. The iris of the large eyes is brown, around the eye a very narrow, white and featherless lid ring runs.
The adult bird looks like a mixture of the small moorhen and the spotted moorhen. The face, front neck and chest are gray-blue. A black, slightly grayish shimmering mask stretches from the base of the beak to the eye, which - becoming pale and as a narrow band - extends from the throat to the chest. The top ear covers are brown. The top of the body from the forehead to the back of the head, neck, back, wings and top of the tail are more or less gray-brown, with the brown coloration being most intense on the head and neck. A black band runs centrally over the head from the forehead to the neck. The back, umbrella and arm feathers have a black spot in their middle and sometimes whitish edges, which makes the plumage look scaled there. The hand covers are only spotted white and black, while the short hand wings are dark brown and light stripes. From the chest to the back, the plumage becomes increasingly white spotted, shortly afterwards it changes into a rough, pale transverse banding. On a light gray base color, two thin black horizontal lines run next to each other, between which the plumage is brown. The under tail-coverts are white with a clearly delimited yellowish field in the middle. Young birds are mostly light brown in color. The middle line of the head is present, but the face is light whitish brown with dark upper ear covers. The upper neck as well as the upper head, the back, the wings and the tail are colored and patterned like the adult bird, but a little paler. The front neck and chest are yellow-brown to light brown. The belly band is even lighter. Otherwise the plumage resembles that of the adult bird.
confusion
As an adult as well as a young bird, the Carolina moorhen can be confused with the Eurasian spotted moorhen . The speckled head and neck, the reddish beak, the missing face mask (which cannot be seen in poor light conditions in the Carolina moorhen), the narrower banding of the belly and the much larger, fuzzy yellowish field are good distinguishing features of the adult bird of the spotted moorhen the under tail-coverts. Fledglings of this species have a speckled front body, an orange beak, and six longitudinal stripes instead of one on the head. The little moorhen and the pygmy moorhen look similar . But they are much slimmer and smaller and have a very thin, yellow-green beak (in the case of the little moorhen there is also a red base). As an adult they lack the face mask, the blue-gray color of the front body extends much further down (to the legs / to the rump), the pattern on the upper side is much coarser and very patchy, and the lower tail covers are banded in black and white (in both sexes).
Way of life
The singing of the Carolina moorhen is quite different. There are slower and deeper trills that are reminiscent of the calls of dwarf divers, also known is a deep dragging whistle with a rising final sound , something like ku-wü , which is similar to the call of a godwit at the beginning of courtship. During the day the bird hides in the bank vegetation and only comes out at dusk. He often wades around the bank in shallow water, but also uses lily pad for running and can swim. When searching for food, the front body is inclined downwards. The Carolina moorhen feeds on small animals such as insects, but also on seeds. The nest is set up in gutted bank vegetation. It is a swimming nest or is on low branches and twigs. It consists of aquatic plants such as reeds and rushes, but also branches and leaves. Breeding areas are floodplain areas, wet meadows or swamps. The species is a migratory bird.
Habitat and Distribution
The Carolina moorhen is native to North America and South America, where it inhabits wetlands, swamps, floodplains, and other bodies of water. The breeding area extends from Hudson Bay to Vancouver Island and in the east to the Labrador Peninsula , from there via southern Canada and the USA to Mexico and some Caribbean islands. Wintering areas are from the southern USA over the whole of Central America to Venezuela , Guiana and French Guiana , then in two strips to the west and east of the main ridge of the Andes to Ecuador and Peru , the western strip extends to the Pacific. The Caribbean islands are also visited for the winter. The Carolina moorhen is an exception in Russia , Alaska , the Galapagos , Hawaii , the Atlantic Islands and Morocco . The species also appears rarely in Europe, but mainly only in the west, in Portugal , Spain , France , Ireland , Great Britain and Sweden .
The species is classified by the IUCN as least concern (not endangered).
literature
- Colin Harrison & Alan Greensmith: Birds . Dorling Kindersley Verlag GmbH, Starnberg 2005, ISBN 3-8310-0785-3
- Svensson, Grant, Mullarney, Zetterström: The new cosmos bird guide . Franckh-Kosmos Verlags-GmbH & Co. KG, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-440-07720-9
