This is Bird Note.

What's the most colorful bird in the U.S.?

The scarlet teenager?

Maybe the painted bunting.

Well, consider one more lustrous candidate, the purple gallon wool.

The purple gallon wool's feathers are so iridescent that they might not seem real.

The head, neck, and underparts are purple.

Colors shade down the back from purple to indigo to azure to golden green.

The forehead is blue, beak red, and legs yellow.

Catching the sun, the entire bird shimmers.

Despite its bold style, a purple gallon wool can be hard to spot.

The colors create excellent camouflage among the greens, blues, and floral highlights of

a marsh.

With lightweight bodies and extremely long toes, gallon wool stride deftly atop water lilies

and other vegetation, snatching up snails, insects, and plants of many kinds.

The purple gallon wool might sound impractical with its big feet and vivid colors, but find

one in a marsh, and all the parts of this bizarre bird will suddenly make sense.

For BirdNode, I'm Michael Stein.