In the past week there has been a clear transition to fall here on the Cape. The air is crisper, the leaves are changing, and the cranberries, that most iconic of local crops, are being harvested. Which, at least this week, turned out to be a good thing for local rare bird seekers. Back on the 16th, at Stay Fresh Cranberry Farm right on Rt 28 in West Yarmouth, the crew was hard at work wet harvesting the back bog when they stumbled across a weird bird stalking the banks of the flooded bog. They noted its freakishly huge feet and greenish wings, but were stumped, so they reached out to the Cape Cod Birders Facebook group. They quickly learned that this was a Purple Gallinule, and that soon they would be getting a spike in visitors to their farm.
This was a lucky stroke for birders – the bog already welcomed visitors to walk the property and check out the harvest, and the owners, who tout their pollinator-friendly ecologically-minded practices, were happy to accommodate birders. Soon, dozens of birders were having a truly premium rare bird experience – this lovely visitor seemed oblivious to people, happily foraging for insects and spiders on the sunny bog berms within a few feet of people and even passing dogs. On my visit, the bird approached me as if it didn’t recognize me as anything other than part of the landscape, and at one point thought the bird might walk right over my legs as I sat on the grass photographing it. It was a bird photographer’s dream.
This Purple Gallinule, being a young bird, was not so purple, but it was still beautiful – close looks in good light revealed at least a muted version of the shimmery greenish wings of an adult, but at the front, where an adult would be a breathtaking mix of indigo, purple, and blue, this youngster is a soft beige. But their best feature may be their feet – I believe the proper physiological term for them is “ginormous”. They are so absurdly, disproportionately big, you’d likely gasp when it lifts its foot to take a step. And you know what they say about birds with big feet – they to allow them to easily walk on lily pads and other floating plants. What did you think I meant?
These are literal lotus-eaters, living a languid life among water lilies in warm tropical wetlands from Florida south through the warm Americas, where water lilies in the lotus genus are among their favorite foods. The Yarmouth bird has been gorging on all manner of inverts at bog edge including especially spiders and crickets. But why is it here? With their chicken-like aura and awkwardly large feet, they don’t seem like good candidates for successfully crossing an ocean. But these and other rails are sneaky athletic, and prone to wander far from their homelands during droughts and cold spells, with records in Iceland and Western Europe.
Stay Fresh Cranberry Farm is my kind of farm – they have a fun social media feed where they speak favorably of things like spiders and goldenrod, which are among my favorite things, but not usually popular among the regular folk. It is the “bog spiders” they talk about that may explain the continued presence of this wayward gallinule. Thousands of wolf spiders are pushed out of bogs when they are flooded for harvest – I saw them massing at the edge of the flooded bog on my visit. Spiders, you see, are a premium bird food – they are sought out by parent birds feeding new chicks because they are high in an essential amino acid called taurine which has been shown in actual research to improve brain development in baby birds.
Incidentally, they also put Taurine in energy drinks. Many are concerned about the health of this bird as temperatures drop, and wildlife rehabbers are on notice to intervene should its condition deteriorate, which has happened with other gallinules here in the north. So before it gets too cold around here, let’s hope all those spiders, and their taurine, make like the energy drink and give this bird wings
