STATUS: Depending on locality, common, rare, or casual.
HABITAT: Highly secretive; spends most of its time beneath dense, rank vegetation. Inhabits shallow, freshwater, grassy, and sedge marshes and wet meadows. In fall and winter, lives in high margins of fresh and saltwater marshes, savannahs, grainfields, hayfields, and among garden crops.
SPECIAL HABITAT REQUIREMENTS: Marshes or wet meadows.
NEST: Prefers to nest in drier portions of marsh, usually where ground is damp but there is no standing water. Conceals nest in dense clumps of marsh grasses, with surrounding vegetation forming canopy over the nest.
FOOD: Eats small snails, insects, seeds of sedges, grasses, and clover leaves (very little has been reported on food habits).
REFERENCES: Anderson 1977, Devitt 1939, Terres 1980, Walkinshaw 1939.