All species › Cranes, rails and allies › Rails and crakes › Purple Gallinule
Purple Gallinule | Porphyrio martinica
Amerikaans purperhoen | Gallineta morada
The Purple Gallinule is a colourful rail that walks over water lilies and other floating leaves on its long toes and regularly clambers into bushes and reeds. It swims less often than the moorhen. The species is known for its wanderlust: young birds in particular turn up far outside the breeding range, even across the Atlantic.
Voice
A series of cackling, hen-like notes, a shrill kek or hiddy-hiddy-hiddy and hoarse grunting sounds. It often calls from cover and also in flight.
Recording: Juan Freile — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
33–37 cm, with long yellow legs and very long toes. Head, neck and underparts are deep purple-blue, the back and wings bronze-green to olive-green. The undertail coverts are entirely white, with no black centre. The bill is red with a yellow tip, the frontal shield pale blue. The sexes are alike. Juveniles are brown to ochre-brown, with a pale belly, greenish wings and a dull yellowish bill; they gradually acquire the blue plumage during their first year. Downy chicks are black.
Confusion species
Common Moorhen Gallinula chloropus is slate grey with a red shield, a white flank line and yellow-green legs. Young moorhens are greyer than young Purple Gallinules and have a whitish flank line. Azure Gallinule Porphyrio flavirostris of Trinidad is smaller and much paler, with a greenish-yellow bill and a pale blue-grey head and breast; juveniles of the two species are alike.
Habitat
Freshwater marshes with floating plants such as water lilies and water hyacinth, ponds and lakes with fringing vegetation, rice fields, canals and swamp forest. It eats seeds, fruit, leaves and flowers of aquatic plants, insects, snails and other small animals, and sometimes takes eggs and young of other birds. The nest is a cup of plant material in dense vegetation above the water.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Resident in Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, the ABC Islands and San Andrés; scarcer in the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas. Local in the Lesser Antilles, including Guadeloupe, Barbados and Grenada; an irregular visitor to the other islands. Outside the region from the south-eastern United States through Mexico and Central America to northern Argentina; the northernmost birds move south in winter.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Marshes and ponds with water lilies offer the best chance, especially early in the morning when the birds feed in the open vegetation. In Trinidad and Cuba the species is seen regularly in suitable marshes and rice fields. A bird walking over the leaves with raised wings shows the white undertail and pale blue shield well.
Conservation status
Not threatened. The species loses habitat locally through the draining of marshes and the clearing of aquatic plants; in rice fields it is sometimes regarded as a pest. It is hunted on a few islands.
Scientific name
Porphyrio martinica | (Linnaeus, 1766)
Linnaeus described the species in 1766 as Fulica martinica; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Porphyrio was introduced in 1760 by Brisson. Porphyrio is Latin, from the Greek porphuriōn, the classical authors' name for the swamphen, from porphura 'purple'. martinica refers to Martinique in the West Indies, where the first specimen came from. The specimen the first description was based on came from Martinique.