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  Profile

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  In flight

Cranes & Waders

African Jacana

Actophilornis africanus

• rare
• 48 km/h
• Least Concern

Walks on floating lily pads via absurdly long toes. Fathers carry chicks under their wings with just legs dangling out.

Population

Large and stable; BirdLife DataZone (2024 assessment, IUCN Red List partner) reports roughly 1,000,000+ individuals globally / ~667,000 mature individuals, stable trend over ~15.6 years, across 40 sub-Saharan African countries. Note: the exact total figure renders as an internally narrow/odd band (e.g. "1,000,000-1,001,000") on the reader-proxied DataZone page across two independent fetches — likely a template/mirror-rendering artifact rather than the true published range — so treat the qualitative picture (large, stable, LC-consistent) as reliable but the precise upper bound as unconfirmed.

Habitat

Shallow permanent or seasonally flooded freshwater wetlands with floating vegetation (especially water-lilies) — marshes, lakes, dams, swamps, and backwaters of slow-flowing rivers with emergent plants, generally below 2,000 m elevation.

Fun fact

The African Jacana has a reversed (polyandrous) breeding system in which one female mates with several males, and each male alone incubates the eggs and raises the chicks — even tucking them underneath his wings to carry them to safety.

Range

Widespread across sub-Saharan Africa (Afrotropic realm), from Senegal in the west to South Africa in the south and east across the continent, roughly 17-24 million km² extent of occurrence across ~40 countries; largely sedentary/resident but shows local nomadic movements of several kilometers between wetlands as water levels fluctuate seasonally.

Diet

Carnivorous: aquatic and terrestrial insects and their larvae, worms, spiders, crustaceans, and molluscs/snails picked from floating vegetation and the water surface, occasionally supplemented with seeds.

Size

0.27 m

Lifespan

4.7 years