Welcome to our Sunday Selfie project. The last few weeks have been very busy for us, looking after our orphaned baby joey, who is doing great, despite giving us some heart stoppers. Please meet one of our wild Purple Swamphens. These beautiful water birds are stunning when the sunlight hits their colorful feathers.

Our Purple Swamphen.
Purple Swamphens have a super long front toe to grab vegetation and hold it while their eating it. It must be like walking in flippers, to try and walk on dry ground with such long front toes.

Note the very long front toes. [Sorry the photo is blurred.]

In the wrong angle of sunlight, sometimes the blue feathers can look cobalt blue, almost black.
Purple Swamphens are very family orientated. All family members, and sometimes the young from a previous brood, share in incubation and care of the young. The nest consists of a platform of trampled reeds, with the surrounding vegetation sometimes being used to form a shelter. Two broods are often raised in a year.
Hope you enjoyed meeting our birds and invite you to visit us again real soon. If your on Facebook you can follow the journey of our beautiful orphan baby joey kangaroo. He’s now reached his one month milestone and doing great. Don’t forget to join our Thankful Thursday Blog Hop which stays open all week. Hope to see you back here real soon. *waves paw* :=o)
As always, Lovin’ your birds and this purple swamphen is no exception. Beautiful! Our human has started a birds blog & FB page. We’ll invite you to visit soon, when it’s further along. Happy Holidays! Carol, Peaches & Paprika
We loved seeing the Purple Swamphen and learning about it. We had never seen one before and we look forward to hearing all about the Joey.
Gorgeous markings. Loved learning about Purple Swamphens – especially their family structure.
I have never seen that type of bird – very interesting. Have a wonderful weekend!
I simply cannot get onto your Sunday selfies and my selfie is a perfect size, etc. After it is uploaded, and it uploads perfectly, I get the message Cancel and return to blog and nothing happens. There is no confirmation that the upload is going to be on the site. Baffled.
Loulou
They are very pretty.
thats an amazing bird… are there other kinds of Swamphens? There was a bird at our zoo that reminded me of this guy, but he was a different color.
The blue color is beautiful and they look very elegant 🙂 Pawkisses 🙂 <3
Good to hear about Joey! Is this like our Pukeko? I need to check them out!