(PEbEo WiA DE Re HEN 
GALLINULA CHLOROPUS 
Loca names in surrounding counties : 
Status IN British Avirauna: A common and widely 
distributed resident, found everywhere in suitable lo- 
calities. 
Rapiat DisrRIBUTION WITHIN FIFTEEN MILES OF ST. 
Paut’s: The Water Hen or Moor Hen is another of 
London’s most familiar birds, made so by the fact of its 
frequenting almost every public pond and ornamental 
water in the Metropolis. It is common in Victoria 
Park, St. James’s Park, Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, 
Battersea Park, Regent’s Park, and at Hampstead. 
Thence it may be met with, wherever there is water and a 
sufficiency of cover, in increasing numbers to the very 
utmost limits of the Metropolitan area. I have often 
flushed this species from ditches and cattle-ponds in the 
corners of fields, and it not unfrequently visits shrubberies, 
lawns, and private grounds at some considerable distance 
from water. It frequents many spots along the ‘Thames, 
the Brent, the Lea, the Wandle, and the Beverley ; there 
is scarcely a sewage-farm, a mill-pond, a reservoir, or 
even a watercress-bed that is not at least visited occa- 
sionally. At Wembley it frequents a small tributary of 
the Brent, and I have often seen it there walking sedately 
about the highway with almost as little concern as a 
barn-door fowl. It is equally familiar at Pinner and 
Uxbridge. In the more public localities the bird has 
become so familiar with man that it can scarcely be 
regarded as wild at all. 
The Water Hen is nothing nearly so shy and retiring in 
its ways as the Corn Crake and seldom resents observa~ 
tion, unless threatened by actual harm. It may be 
watched walking sedately about the grass-land in measured 
302 
