Meet this young family that has “moved into” a busy neighbourhood close to an IT Zone in Chennai

In Indira Priyadarshini Nagar which adjoins both sides of the road leading to Global Hospitals in Perumbakkam, Chennai, layouts are dotted with vacant plots as much as buildings. The buildings display signs of human civilisation, and the vacant plots bear the insignia of Nature. Walk down any of those cross streets and you might luck into avian families. 

The species to be found are the purple moorhen, bronze-winged jacana, white-breasted waterhen, pheasant-tailed jacana (in rare patches) and the common moorhen. 

A Common moorhen chick at Indira Priyadarshini Nagar in Perumbakkam on July 25, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
PRINCE FREDERICK

Water-filled plots supporting Avian life are a feature of residential layouts adjacent to Pallikaranai marsh and Perumbakkam wetland (which in fact is considered part of Pallikaranai marsh). In Karapakkam, a layout (River View Residency) this nature exists. In Perumbakkam, one has Indira Priyadarshini Nagar.

Currently, in a boggy vacant land at the end of Sixth Cross Street, one will come upon a young family of Common moorhens. After dusk one might miss much of the family — the young members of the family — as they can blend effortlessly into the enveloping darkness. 

A common moorhen (Gallinula chloropus) allopreens its young one at Indira Priyadarshini Nagar in Perumbakkam on July 25, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
PRINCE FREDERICK

With downy black feathers, Moorhen chicks look aerial and even when the camera has captured their frames in sharp focus, they could look pixelated. They inhabit the unreal from the get-go, arriving firm-footed even as they crackle out of the eggs. And these little ones sure know how to run for cover. At the slightest intimation of any intrusive presence, they sprint to their parents’ protective side with a speed that suggests fairy dust has been sprinkled on them. 

In these boggy, water-filled patches, besides bulrushes, there is enough duckweed and other floating vegetation that turn the digestive juices within these birds. Among the characteristics of the common moorhen is how the parents deign to feed the chicks till they feel a sense of surfeit. This is interesting as the chicks are known to be gregarious feeders and precocious enough to fend for themselves. Recently, when this writer had a look-in at this patch, a parent was being extremely doting: it was allopreening three of the chicks, one after the other. It was quite a packed family with eight chicks around to be counted. The other parent was missing from the scene. Both parents share the responsibility of raising the young.