A waterhen family among moss and water spinach in a neglected city pond

On 19 July 2026 the agriculture and nature section of Jagonews24 published a short photo essay by Tahmid Hasan, a student of Gono Bishwabidyalay, a private university in Savar founded by the non-profit Gonoshasthaya Kendra. He wrote about a family of waterhens, known in Bengali as dahuk, that had settled in a neglected pond right behind his house. Thick moss and water spinach (kalmi) covered the water and spread like a green carpet to the banks, and among the plants and the bushes along the edge a group of the birds moved about all day, making small sounds and leading their chicks along the water's edge. The photographs with the essay were supplied by the writer. The bird he described, dark grey above with a white face and breast and a reddish tinge under the tail, matches the white-breasted waterhen (Amaurornis phoenicurus), which the Red List of Bangladesh published by IUCN in 2015 lists under the local names Dahuk and Dholabook Dahuk.

According to the essay, no one had used the pond for a long time apart from the spreading growth that covered it. The writer's point was that a water body which people neglect and treat as useless does not stay empty: another household grows there. Among the gaps in the water spinach and behind the bushes, he wrote, the waterhens lived whether anyone noticed them or not, and their family was growing, either in neglect or in the best of care.

He noted that the dahuk is a very familiar name in Bengal, yet few people actually get to see the bird. Most people know it from its sharp, somewhat harsh call drifting from a distance at night or on monsoon mornings. He counted himself lucky to have met this temporary resident without looking for it, and admired the contrast in its colours: dark grey on the upper body, white on the breast and face, and a reddish tinge beneath the tail.

What struck him most was the setting. The bird he associated with village ponds, paddy ridges and bamboo groves was living in the bushes of an abandoned pond of black water in the lap of what he called a poisoned city, and was walking the edge of the pond with its chicks. He also wondered whether, in the city, the dahuk might be a migrant. The essay did not name the city or give the pond's exact location, and this report does not add one.

The white-breasted waterhen is a waterbird of the rail and crake family, Rallidae, and is widely distributed across South and Southeast Asia. It was described by the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant in 1769. Ornithological references summarised in the species' encyclopaedia entry, among them Rasmussen and Anderton's Birds of South Asia (2005) and Ali and Ripley's Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan (1980), describe adults with mainly dark grey upperparts and flanks and a white face, neck and breast. The lower belly and the area under the tail are cinnamon or white, which is the reddish tinge the writer saw. The bird is about 32 centimetres long, has long toes, a short tail and a yellow bill and legs, and its body is flattened from side to side, which lets it slip through reeds and undergrowth.

The sexes look alike, though females are slightly smaller. Young birds are much duller versions of the adults, and the downy chicks are black, as in all rails. The IUCN Bangladesh assessment notes that of the four known subspecies, the nominate form, Amaurornis phoenicurus phoenicurus, is the one that occurs in Bangladesh, citing Islam and Chakma (2008).

The bird has many local names across its range. Some imitate its call, such as ruak-ruak in Malay and korawakka in Sinhala, while others do not: it is called Dahuk in Bengali in Bangladesh and the Bengali-speaking parts of India, Dauk in Assamese and Daahuka in Odia, according to a 1998 compilation of vernacular bird names published in the journal Buceros.

Many rails are very secretive, but this species is bolder than most. It is often seen out in the open, stepping slowly with its tail cocked upright and jerking it as it walks, in open marshes and even in drains beside busy roads. That habit explains why a family could be watched from a house beside an urban pond.

The writer's remark that most people know the dahuk by its voice fits the ornithological record. The species is largely crepuscular, that is, active mainly at dawn and dusk, and it can be noisy at those hours with loud, croaking calls. During the breeding season, just after the first rains, it makes loud and repetitive croaking calls. The naturalist writer Edward Hamilton Aitken, who wrote as Eha, described the call, in a passage reproduced in Hugh Whistler's Popular Handbook of Indian Birds, as starting with harsh roars and then changing suddenly to a clear note repeated like the coo of a dove.

The essay also recalled a belief the writer had heard: if a waterhen sees someone eating and is not given a share, a curse follows. He described such sayings as passed down by word of mouth for generations, giving an ordinary bird a kind of mysterious standing in rural culture, and he left open whether there was any truth in it. It is folklore, and it is reported here as such.

The IUCN Bangladesh species profile describes the white-breasted waterhen as usually seen alone or in pairs in marshes, canals, ponds, ditches and other water bodies with vegetation cover. It often uses habitats close to human settlement, including agricultural fields, sewage ponds, village ponds, parks and gardens, and it is found in different wetlands with dense vegetation throughout the country. By that account, a weed-covered pond behind a house, even in a town, is the kind of place the species is known to use.

The writer's own description of its preferences matches: ponds and ditches covered in bushes, reeds, water hyacinth or dense aquatic plants, the ridges of paddy fields and the edges of bamboo groves. Dense cover gives it safety and lets it move about unseen by predators. With its long legs, he wrote, it walks easily across water hyacinth, and when needed it swims across small ponds. The IUCN profile likewise says it forages by walking on water weeds.

On food, the essay listed insects, earthworms, snails, small fish and tadpoles as well as seeds, grains of rice and soft plant parts, and said this varied diet helps the bird survive easily in the countryside. The IUCN Bangladesh profile gives its food as insects, larvae, molluscs, seeds and the shoots of aquatic plants. Studies in India summarised in the species' encyclopaedia entry add that it probes with its bill in mud or shallow water and also picks up food by sight; that large numbers of beetles have been recorded in its diet; that small fish are often carefully washed in water before being eaten; and that it sometimes feeds in deeper water in the manner of a moorhen.

As for the writer's question whether the city birds might be migrants, the IUCN assessment calls the species a common resident of Bangladesh, and the ornithological literature describes white-breasted waterhens as permanent residents throughout their range that make short-distance movements and are known to colonise new areas. They were among the early colonisers of the volcanic island of Anak Krakatau in Indonesia, according to a 1992 study by Zann and Darjono, and a 2010 paper by Buden and Retogral in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology recorded the species spreading into Micronesia. Short movements of that kind, rather than seasonal migration, are what the sources describe.

The essay's chicks fit the bird's calendar. The nesting season is mainly June to October, though it varies locally, according to observations by Dhindsa, Sandhu and Toor published in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society in 1983. Those observations describe nests placed in a dry spot on the ground in marsh vegetation and clutches of six to seven eggs, which hatch in about 19 days. Courtship involves bowing, billing and nibbling.

Both parents incubate the eggs and look after the chicks, and the chicks often dive under water to escape predators, according to Ali and Ripley's handbook. A 2008 case study by Gopakumar and Kaimal, presented at the 12th World Lake Conference, reported that adults build a roost or brood nest where the young chicks and the adults roost. For Bangladesh, the IUCN profile, citing Islam and Chakma (2008) and Akhtar and colleagues (2013), records nests in trees and bamboo groves near water, two to five metres above the ground.

The green mat the writer called moss deserves a note. Banglapedia, the national encyclopaedia of Bangladesh, says in its article on freshwater plants that the country's fresh waters hold every kind of plant from viruses, bacteria, fungi, algae and lichens to liverworts, mosses, ferns and flowering plants, with only the gymnosperms missing, but that no aquatic moss had yet been found in Bangladesh, although aquatic mosses such as Fissidens, Fontinalis and Sphagnum grow elsewhere in the world. Freshwater algae, by contrast, are countless. The green growth that covers a still pond and is called moss in everyday speech is therefore, by that account, more likely to be algae or small floating plants; Banglapedia lists the floating ferns Azolla pinnata and several Salvinia species among the country's aquatic ferns.

Banglapedia also explains a related sight in neglected ponds. When plankton grows excessively, the water sometimes turns green or red, a condition called a water bloom. It is short-lived, but it pollutes the water and kills fish. In Bangladesh water blooms are caused by organisms such as Microcystis aeruginosa, Oscillatoria, Anabaena, Euglena, Volvox and Carteria.

The water spinach is the plant Bengali speakers call kalmi. Banglapedia lists kalmi, Ipomoea aquatica of the morning glory family Convolvulaceae, among the country's leafy vegetables, alongside gima kalmi (Ipomoea reptans) and the sweet potato, and names it among the notable aquatic dicots of Bangladesh's fresh waters, with water lilies, lotus and makhana. Botanical descriptions characterise it as a semi-aquatic tropical plant that grows in water or on moist soil. Its stems are two to three metres long or more and root at the nodes, and a hollow cavity in the stem keeps the plant afloat. The leaves vary from arrowhead-shaped to lance-shaped, 5 to 15 centimetres long, and the trumpet-shaped flowers, 3 to 5 centimetres across, are usually white with a mauve centre. The IUCN global Red List assessed the species as Least Concern in 2018.

Research on the plant is relevant to a pond of black water in a polluted city. Water spinach has been studied as a purifier of aquatic habitats because it efficiently accumulates cadmium, lead and mercury, a property that, as studies including one by Göthberg, Greger and Bengtsson on water spinach grown around Bangkok, Thailand (2009) point out, can be dangerous when the plant is grown for human or animal food in polluted water. A 2007 study by Vuong and colleagues found faecal and protozoan parasite contamination of water spinach grown in urban wastewater in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. These studies concern other places; nothing in the essay describes the condition of this particular pond's water.

The writer said the dahuk was still a relatively common resident in Bangladesh, not yet on the endangered list, but that its habitat was shrinking under urbanisation and the loss of small water bodies. The official assessment supports both halves of that statement. Banglapedia records 628 bird species for Bangladesh, of which 388 are resident and 240 migratory. The Red List of Bangladesh, Volume 3: Birds, prepared by IUCN's Bangladesh Country Office for the Bangladesh Forest Department and published in 2015, assessed 566 species: 424 Least Concern, 29 Near Threatened, 39 threatened (10 Critically Endangered, 12 Endangered and 17 Vulnerable), 55 Data Deficient and 19 Regionally Extinct.

The white-breasted waterhen was assessed as Least Concern on 15 November 2014. The justification describes it as a common resident widely distributed in different wetland habitats of Bangladesh, and adds that one of its traditional habitats, the derelict ponds of the villages, is disappearing, with a consequent decrease in its population there, while its populations in other water bodies, inundated paddy fields and marshes are still healthy. The profile gives the total population as unknown, the trend as decreasing and the generation time as 3.7 years. In the first national assessment of 2000 the species was rated Not Threatened. Globally, BirdLife International assessed it as Least Concern for the IUCN Red List in 2016.

The same IUCN volume explains why village ponds matter. Traditionally, it says, every household in the villages of Bangladesh had an orchard, a bamboo grove, a vegetable garden and a small pond, and villages were good habitat for many birds; with population growth and consumerism many villages are turning into mini townships or shanty towns, although some still keep their traditional look. It lists waterhens among the birds usually seen in homestead vegetation. A family of dahuks in an overgrown pond behind a house is, in that sense, living in a remnant of the homestead habitat the assessment describes.

On the date of the essay, wild birds in Bangladesh were protected by the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act 2026, Act No. 86 of 2026, dated 10 April 2026 and deemed to have taken effect on 7 January 2026. It repealed the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act 2012. Its preamble refers to Article 18A of the Constitution, which includes the conservation and security of biodiversity, forests and wildlife among the duties of the state. The Act's schedule of protected animals lists the White-breasted Waterhen, Amaurornis phoenicurus, in Schedule 1(c), and section 2 defines a protected animal as wildlife listed in Schedules 1(a), 1(b), 1(c) and 2.

The provisions that apply to a bird in Schedule 1(c) are these, as the official text sets them out:

• Section 41(4): no person may hunt wildlife listed in Schedule 1(c). Under section 2, hunting means killing, catching or poisoning a wild animal or any similar attempt, chasing it for that purpose, injuring or harming it, taking any part of it, or collecting or destroying the nests or eggs of wild birds or reptiles.
• Section 44 sets the penalty for breaking section 41(4) at imprisonment of up to two years or a fine of up to 1 lakh taka or both, and up to four years or 2 lakh taka or both for a repeat offence.
• Section 41(5): no person may collect, possess, buy or sell the trophy, meat or body parts of wildlife in Schedules 1(b) and 1(c) without a permit under section 26; the penalty is up to one year or 1 lakh taka or both, and up to two years or 2 lakh taka or both for a repeat offence.
• Section 10(1): no person may rear or keep any wild animal captive, or possess, buy, sell or transport it, without a licence, possession certificate or permit; section 10(2) bars buying and selling wildlife through social media advertisements, markets or any other means.
• Section 10(4): cruelty to a wild animal is a punishable offence; the explanation includes beating, teasing, unnecessary confinement, causing distress in transport and publishing cruelty to wildlife on social media. Breaking section 10 carries up to one year or 1 lakh taka or both, and up to two years or 2 lakh taka or both for a repeat offence.

For a family of waterhens with chicks in a pond, the definition of hunting matters most: under the Act, catching the chicks or collecting or destroying the nest or eggs counts as hunting a protected bird.

The essay closed on the bird's place in Bengali culture. The writer observed that the waterhen's call has returned again and again in Bengali poetry and song as an inseparable part of the evening and night landscape of rural Bengal, and that in nature poetry, especially in the descriptions of Rupashi Bangla, the calls of night birds are often used to convey solitude, the rhythm of village life and the image of the countryside. Rupashi Bangla is the collection in which Jibanananda Das described the beauty of rural Bengal, earning him, according to Banglapedia, the title Rupasi Banglar Kavi, the poet of beautiful Bengal. The bird has also lent its name to fiction: Banglapedia lists Dahuk (1992) among the novels of the poet Al Mahmud.

Banglapedia's Bengali article on birds, which shows the dahuk among the illustrated common birds of the country, notes that some of the old Sanskrit names for birds were based on their calls, such as kak for the crow, and others on colour, habits or gait. For the writer, the bird that belonged in village verse had chosen a pond in a city full of factory smoke as the home for its pair and their chicks. He ended the essay by saying he kept thinking about it, and that the waterhens were his guests.

Photo: Frameofashik / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: Jagonews24, IUCN Bangladesh (Red List of Bangladesh, Volume 3: Birds, 2015), Legislative and Parliamentary Affairs Division (Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act 2026), Banglapedia, Wikipedia