Water rail
Water rails are omnivorous, although they mainly feed on animals. These include leeches, worms, gastropods, small crustaceans, spiders, and a wide range of both terrestrial and aquatic insects and their larvae. Small vertebrates such as amphibians, fish, birds and mammals may be killed or eaten as carrion. Vertebrates are impaled with a strike of the bill which breaks the prey's spinal cord. Plant food, which is consumed more in autumn and winter, includes the buds, flowers, shoots and seeds of water plants, berries and fruit. In south Asia, paddy (harvested rice kernels) may sometimes be eaten. The young rails are fed mainly on insects and spiders. Food obtained on land or from mud is normally washed in water before it is eaten. After rain, rails may probe soft ground for earthworms. This species will occasionally feed in the open even when not forced to do so by cold weather; Edmund Meade-Waldo described seven rails feeding in an open meadow. Despite its skulking nature, the water rail appears to thrive in captivity when fed on animal food such as raw meat or earthworms; one individual was taught to jump for worms suspended from a fishing rod.
Marsh rice rat
Animals that are important to the marsh rice rat's diet include insects, fiddler crabs, and snails, but the species is known to eat many other animals, including fish, clams, and juvenile "Graptemys" and "Chrysemys" turtles. They scavenge on carcasses of muskrats, deermice, and sparrows, and may be the most important predator on eggs and young of the marsh wren. Rice rats also eat eggs and young of the seaside sparrow ("Ammodramus maritimus") and are aggressive towards the sparrow, apparently leading it to avoid nesting in "Juncus" in a seaside salt marsh in Florida. On islands in North Carolina, rice rats consume eggs of Forster's tern ("Sterna forsteri"). They have been observed preying on alligator eggs in Georgia.