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.
Water rail
The water rail can readily be distinguished from most other reed bed rails by its white undertail and red bill; the latter is a little longer than the rest of the rail's head (55–58% of the total) and slightly down-curved. The somewhat similar slaty-breasted rail of tropical Asia has a stouter bill, a chestnut crown and white-spotted upperparts. Juvenile and freshly moulted water rails may show a buff undertail like spotted crake, but that species' plumage is spotted with white, and it has a much shorter, mainly yellowish bill. The range of the water rail does not overlap with that of any other "Rallus" species, but vagrants could be distinguished from their American relatives by the lack of rufous or chestnut on the closed wing. The larger African rail has unstreaked darker brown upperparts and brighter red legs and feet.