Moorhen provides squawks, cackles and clucks in Pocono wetland

The loud, sudden sound that exploded out of the marsh jolted me to attention as I explored the remote wetlands near the Pike-Monroe County border on June 10. It was a call with which I was very familiar — an unmistakable series of squawking clucks that started off rapidly and then tailed off into a few more widely spaced "cow-cow-cows."

However, just as it's sometimes difficult to place a familiar face if it's seen in a new or different setting, the call was confusing to me at first. I knew that I'd heard it many times before, but probably never in the Poconos. Then I realized where I had often met this bird over the years — the swamps and marshes of Florida.

It was a moorhen, or gallinule, an abundant marsh bird of the South, but very localized and uncommon in Pennsylvania.

Although it swims in open water like a duck, the moorhen isn't related to these waterfowl at all. The moorhen, the coot and their Everglades cousin, the purple gallinule, are all in the rail family. Whereas rails are famous for their extremely secretive behavior and tendency to disappear into the reeds and cattails, the moorhen is more likely to frequent the open areas of well-vegetated marshes, or swim around ponds that are fringed with lots of cattails, rushes, sedges and other emergent aquatic plants.

Formerly called the common gallinule, it was given the name moorhen because it's the same bird that goes by this appellation in Europe. In fact, the moorhen is found all over the world. In the Americas, it lives in wetlands from southern Canada down to southern South America.

The identity of an adult moorhen is very easy to ascertain: a plump bird, 13 or 14 inches long, with a slaty-gray body, greenish legs, some white under the tail and along the sides and — most distinctive of all — a vivid red frontal face-shield and a red bill with a yellow tip. Throughout most of its range in our country, the only similar birds are the brilliantly iridescent purple of gallinule in the Everglades and the widespread American coot, which is black with a white bill.

From a distance, the moorhen can instantly be differentiated from ducks by its habit of constantly bobbing its head up and down while swimming. Even when it's hiding, the moorhen's presence is often betrayed by its squawks, cackles, clucks and nasal whining calls.

In Pennsylvania, the moorhen wasn't confirmed as a breeding bird until 1904 in the Philadelphia area's marshes, and then nearly four decades later in the Pymatuning and Conneaut marshes in the northeastern corner of the state. Throughout the rest of our state, it remains a very uncommon and mysterious bird that is either hidden from view or entirely absent. In New York state it is a fairly common summer nesting bird in Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, where it generally arrives each spring in mid-April and departs on its southward migration by mid-November.

A moorhen's nest is a shallow platform of dead cattails, rushes and other plants, raised a few inches above the surface of the water. The male also builds several "dormitory nests" for the female and babies to rest upon in summer.

During the statewide census of Pennsylvania's breeding birds in the 1980s, the moorhen was confirmed in very few sites other than the northwestern marshes. I intend to take my kayak out to the Pocono wetland where I heard this unique bird and search for it again this summer.