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Slipping past a patch of reeds, I slow to look for the purple gallinule, Porphyrula martinica. My father called it a pond chicken. No dead bird skin can capture the way this creature walks weightlessly over lily pads and floating reeds. That's why I've come out today, after all---to get the gizz of one purple pond chicken. I skim close to every clump of bulrush, wild rice, and pickerelweed. For a moment, the only sound is my paddle and the water. Then here come the moorhens, cousins to the gallinule, swimming around me. Their beaks are white, and their feathers are black, where the gallinule's are blue, violet, and rainbow-shine green. They start up with their high, collective cackle. "Listen to 'em laughing at us," my dad would say.
"Get out there," Estelle said, "before you lose touch." What exactly was that supposed to mean?
I spy a limpkin among the reeds, poking its tweezer-like beak in the mud for apple snails. Crying birds, they call them, because of the baleful sound they make trying to get a mate into their nest. It almost sounds like a baby's wail. I do a quick sketch of the limpkin's long legs and slender, curving bill, the variegation of its brown and white feathers.
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