W. Leon Dawson (1923) describes their feeding habits at the Farallones, as follows:
Three red phalaropes, all female I take it, although none of them in highest plumage, and one northern, also a female, just under "high," are pasturing at my feet in a brackish pool some 20 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 2 feet deep. The waters of the pool teem with a minute reddish crustacean (?) shaped like an ant, less than a thirty-second of an inch in length and incredibly nimble. The insects progress by leaps, and are visible only at the moment of arrival. Yet these birds gobble them up one at a time with unerring accuracy and with a rapidity which is nothing short of marvelous. The reds work habitually at the rate of five dabs per second, i. e., 300 a minute, while the northern, with a longer beak and a much daintier motion, works only half as fast.
The following observation was made on a California beach by Roland C. Ross (1922):
Kelp flies seemed to satisfy its sporting instincts and hunger, and the bird stalked them slowly and pointedly one by one. With bill and neck outstretched and lowered in line with a fly on the sand, a slow advance was made until with a pounce the hunt closed. If the fly escaped, the phalarope sometimes ran after it, bill out. Another pose interested me. On finding a kelp mass decaying and drawing flies, the phalarope approached closely and so low that his breast touched the ground, but the rear of the bird was high up. At times he would remain with breast down and pick at the flies much as a dusting fowl picks up a stray grain. Mr. L. E. Wyman reported similar "breast to ground" actions of two phalaropes he saw feeding by a kelp mass on the beach.
Alexander Wetmore (1925), in his report on the food of the red phalarope, analyzed the contents of 36 stomachs, mainly from the Pribilof Islands, with some from New York and Maine; they were collected from May to November, but mainly in August. Crustaceans made up 33.5 per cent of the food; beetles amounted to 27.3 per cent; flies formed 22.7 per cent; and 6.8 per cent consisted of tiny fishes, mostly sculpins. The food of this species therefore shows it to be harmless or neutral.
_Behavior._--Phalaropes are active, lively birds in all their movements and they seem to be constantly on the move. They are all rapid fliers and this species is decidedly the swiftest on the wing of all three. As the restless flocks move about over the water, their aerial evolutions are well worth watching. Lucien M. Turner, in his Labrador notes, writes that he has seen them "ascend to a great height in increasing circles, darting in and out among each other and making a peculiar twitter as they ascend. When some suitable locality is discerned these birds descend almost perpendicularly and drop on the water as softly as a feather." They are so much like sandpipers in appearance and in manner of flight that one is always surprised to see them alight on the water.