Purple Gallinule

About the Purple Gallinule

The Purple Gallinule may be the most extravagantly colored waterbird in North America - iridescent violet-blue head and body, bronze-green back, a red-and-yellow candy-corn bill, sky-blue forehead shield, and absurd banana-yellow legs. It looks like it escaped from a tropical aviary, and in a sense it did: this is a tropical marsh bird at the northern edge of its range.

Those enormous long-toed feet spread the bird's weight so it can literally walk on lily pads, striding across floating vegetation, flicking its white undertail, and picking off seeds, flowers, insects, and frogs as it goes. It clambers through marsh shrubs with equal ease, and young birds from earlier broods famously help feed their younger siblings.

In Texas, Purple Gallinules are summer breeders in coastal-plain marshes and lily-covered ponds, mostly April through September, occasionally wandering far inland. A sunlit adult tiptoeing across the pads is one of the most colorful sights in Texas wetlands.