I remember as if it was yesterday the excitement of seeing my first purple gallinule on a bend of the Ribeira de São Lourenço at Ludo, Portugal on 27th September 1992. I got up at first light and drove along a rough track with no satnav to guide me and no clear idea where I was going except a brief reference in an old book. I parked the car and could see my destination about 200m away, a rickety hide on stilts overlooking the river, surrounded by reeds in the middle of Ria Formosa.
To get into the hide I had to battle through dense vegetation which made it seem like nobody had been there for years, and then climb up a metal ladder. I entered through a trap door and I could feel the hide swaying as I entered it. On closing the trap door, which I had to do for fear of falling out, I opened the window and found that there was a mist over the river which was packed with coots, gadwall and mallard. After a while the mist had cleared a bit, and suddenly I saw a large dark bird fly across the water and crash into the reeds on the other side, and later I saw another eating reeds by holding them in its ridiculous feet.
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| Ribeira de São Lourenço, September 1992 |
At the time this seemed a remarkable sighting of a species which I thought of as the holy grail of European birding, and a bird which I thought would be very skulking and difficult to see. Two days later that myth was exploded when I found another three walking on the greens of a golf course at Vilamoura, and ever since then I've done very well for the species, even seeing one in the UK in 2016.
