Discover Top Posts Tagged with #black rail

Virginia Wildlife; vol. 32, no. 10. October, 1971. Illustration by John W. Taylor.

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#birds #wading birds #rails #sora #yellow rail #black rail #virginia rail #clapper rail #king rail #coots #american coot #gallinules #common gallinule #purple gallinule #John W. Taylor

BOTD: Black Rail

Photo: Julio Mulero

"A tiny marsh bird, no bigger than a sparrow. Extremely secretive, it walks or runs through the marsh, and is rarely seen in flight. In very dense cover, it may get around by using the runways made by mice. The distinctive short song of the Black Rail is given mostly late at night, so the bird may go unnoticed in some areas. Fairly common at a few coastal points, its status inland in the east is rather mysterious."

- Audubon Field Guide

#birds #black rail #birds of north america #north american birds #rails #wading birds #waders #birds of the us #birds of the caribbean #birds of america #american birds #bird #birding #birdblr #birblr #bird watching #bird of the day #Laterallus jamaicensis

Black Rail

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After a decade of petitions and lawsuits from environmental groups, the federal government has granted endangered species protection to a mysterious marsh bird that has recently been found to have a small and fragile population on the Louisiana coast. The beignet-sized black rail has red eyes, dark gray feathers and big feet. It rarely flies, instead preferring to creep around remote wetlands at night.

#black rail #Louisiana #Endangered Species Act

A secretive marsh bird faces existential threat from rising seas | The Guardian

There may be fewer than a few thousand of the eastern black rail left. Its habitat is shrinking because of development, pollution and global heating. In time, the salty gulf will inundate this field in south-west Louisiana. In nearby Texas, some black rails probably lost their homes to Hurricane Harvey, which dumped more rain because of rising temperatures.

The bird’s plight also highlights the challenges the government is already facing in safeguarding species against climate breakdown and the tension between fighting global heating and the wants of industry. Soon Donald Trump’s interior department will overhaul the rules for protecting species, with changes that could make it even harder to consider the current and long-term threats of global heating. Many campaigners see this as a potential disaster with far-reaching implications beyond any single species.

By the end of the year, the US Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to list the black rail as threatened, a move that could protect its dwindling numbers but has taken nine years to complete. That’s faster than the average timeline of 12 years but slow enough that the rail population has continued to significantly decline.

“The numbers are not good, and frankly we’re on the cusp of learning. A lot of the recent black rail work has happened in the last decade,” said Woody Woodrow, a US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in Texas. “It’s probably the least studied and least understood bird in North America.”

Now the bird could theoretically go extinct before scientists know much about it, Woodrow added.

The black rail was once in 35 states, in coastal and inland wetlands. Its population has probably declined 75% or more in the last 10 to 20 years, although data is limited because the bird hides so well. Most remaining black rails are thought to be in the south-east US, which is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

#Black Rail #Laterallus jamaicensis #Laterallus #Rallidae #Gruiformes #Aves #birds #rail #endangered #conservation #climate change

Inktober Day 7: Shy

Black Rail (Laterallus jamaicensis)

Surveys of thousands of possible sites in South Carolina in Georgia turned up fewer than 10 black rail responses.

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Researchers find the origin of an isolated bird species on South Atlantic island

By wings or maybe riding on debris, that's how a now-flightless and rare species of tiny birds likely got to Inaccessible Island, an aptly named small island of volcanic origin in the middle of the South Atlantic. And it turns out that the bird, a rail, listed scientifically as Atlantisia rogersi, needs a name change, says Martin Stervander, a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Oregon. His four-member team has found genetic evidence that ties the bird to a South American species.

Inaccessible Island, the westernmost of three islands in the Tristan Archipelago, is the only place in the world where this species of rail lives. The island, formed by a now-extinct volcano 3 to 6 million years ago, is located roughly 3,600 kilometers (2,250 miles) east of Porto Alegre, Brazil, and about 2,800 kilometers (1,750 miles) west of Cape Town, South Africa.

The birds were first described in 1923 by British surgeon Percy Lowe, a bird-lover who then headed the ornithology collections at the British Museum. He placed the birds in the genus Atlantisia, a reference to mythical Atlantis, and named the species rogersi after the Rev. H.M.C. Rogers, a chaplain on nearby island Tristan da Cunha, who was the first to collect specimens. Lowe surmised that the birds walked to the island on a since-sunken land bridge from Africa or South America, but the later discovery of plate tectonics ruled out that idea, Stervander said.

"We found obviously that the birds did not walk by foot," he said. "They flew or were assisted by floating debris. Whether they flew all the way or were swept off by a storm and then landed on debris, we can't say. In any case, they managed to make it from the mainland of South America to Inaccessible Island."

Using modern sequencing of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA and phylogenetic methods, Stervander's team tied the island's rail to the South American dot-winged crake, a rail species known as Porzana spiloptera. The split came 1.5 million years ago, with the rail colonizing Inaccessible Island in a single migration, the team concluded in a paper put online Oct. 12 by the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.

Their genetics also make them relatives of black rails (Laterallus jamaicensis) found in the Americas and likely the Galapagos crake (Laterallus spilonota), which also has a reduced flight ability. Stervander's team recommends that the Inaccessible Island rail species be reclassified in the genus Laterallus as are the related species.

"We are sorry to be suggesting that we take away this beautiful name, Atlantisia, which is something we can all love, but we can now say that the closest relatives of this species are American birds that were given their name before the Inaccessible Island rail," Stervander said.