Northern Jacana

We saw a few of these waders in Costa Rica. The northern jacana  is reported by Wikipedia as being found mainly in central America between Mexico and Panama, sometimes also the southern US states.

The body colouring shows an interesting green/brown contrast, and the yellow beak and wattle are quite striking. The underwing flight feathers are also said to be yellow, but we did not see this.

See those huge feet, that are ideal for walking about on floating vegetation while feeding. As a result, Wikipedia reports that “in Jamaica this bird is also known as the ‘Jesus bird’, as it appears to walk on water”.

northern_jacana_portraitI prefer the portrait crop with reflections, but unfortunately the water was not quite still enough as the bird was walking about.

 

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.