Field Notes 149 



FIELD NOTES 



Ax Experience Wrn£ a Florida Gallixule. 



On or about the twelfth of last May I beard of a strange bird that 

 was in a certain grocery store window. Being naturally curious I 

 thought I would stop in and see it. The grocer was not acquainted with 

 the binl and was not able to find any more definite name for it than that 

 it was a green legged snipe. I myself had never seen a gallinule but I 

 knew at first glance that it belonged to the same family as the coot, which 

 bird 1 was quite familiar witli in some of his northern Iowa breeding 

 grounds. 



I got out my Chapmans and Eeed's and easily placed him with his 

 proper name. This incident occurred in Des Moines, la. The breeding 

 ground of the gallinule is in Minnesota and the Dakotas. This par- 

 ticular species, the Florida gallinule, is never found in this territory 

 except on its yearly migrations. 



The bird was found tangled up in some barb wire fence about a mile 

 from a river in a more or less populated portion of the city. My assump- 

 tion is that the bird in flying strayed a little lower than its comrades 

 and thus met its fate. It had the characteristic slate color of the family, 

 the legs were a bright green with a reddish tinge on the upper part of the 

 femur, the bill and nose plate were red, except for about one-half an inch 

 of yellow on the tip of the bill. This latter point or characteristic was 

 probably an anomaly. This is true of the Purple gallinule but not of 

 the Florida. The serrated edging of white along the lower margin of the 

 wings, together with the reddish upper femur, distinguished it as the 

 Florida rather than the Purple, which it so closely resembles. I have 

 found these differences and variations in the color of the mandibles of 

 water birds to be quite common. 



The fact that these birds fly at night, and being as they are by nature 

 weak flyers, probably accounts for the strange situation in which he 

 was found. 



I paid the sum of fifty cents for the bird, took it to the zoology 

 department at Drake University, where we caged it and kept it under 

 observation while it recovered from its unusual experience. 



At first he was very tame and made no fuss at being handled, but 

 soon he became restless and it became a problem what to do with his 

 Floridaship, The bird thrived on angle worms but ate cracked corn 

 when there Avas nothing better. 



When school closed the tenth of .lune, I carried him in a yeast foam 

 box a distance of about two hundred miles north to the Iowa City Lake- 

 side Laboratory at Lake Okoboji. Here I tethered him out on the shore 

 by a string about twenty feet long. He seemed quite content with his 



