THE RAILS

Learning birds is always fun, but nothing is more fun than discovering those truly odd-ball birds. And of all the peculiar birds I’ve learned about of late, there is none odder nor more fascinating than the rail.      The first time I heard about rails was on a birding trip, when a sage birder turned to me and winked, indicating a clump of cattails with the words, “Nice place to find, say, a rail…!” His tone implied that finding a rail was a wonderful thing to do, even though at that particular time I had no idea what a rail was. But I filed it away for later.      Cattails and reeds are excellent places to find rails, as they are shy, secretive marsh-dwellers, more likely to be heard than seen. Rails hail from the family Gruiforme, along with cranes, limpkins, moorhens, gallinules, and coots. (You can tell from the names alone it’s an interesting family…!)      As for the rails, they are unique in the shape of their bodies, which are, to quote the ornithologists, “laterally compressed.” If this arcane phrase leaves you wondering, think “flat.” Viewed from the side, a rail looks normal enough — a plumpish bird with fairly long legs and a long bill — but viewed head-on, it looks like it’s gone through a wringer. A rail is a creature of two dimensions, as though a cartoon silhouette had leapt off the page and ran around in the world without ever plumping up into reality.      The expression “thin as a rail” refers not (as I’d always thought) to a skinny post found on a stairway, but to this flat unlikely bird. Lateral compression helps rails make their way through the stems of marshy vegetation, barely making a ripple as they go.      Thin rails walk a thin line, as well, placing one foot directly in front of another and leaving behind a single line of tracks.      They are less than graceful fliers, and prefer to skulk about on land. Because their habitat is so dense, they communicate with each other by sound, calling frequently to keep in touch with the hidden members of their tribe.      Rails are omnivorous, eating whatever is most available, from seeds and plants in season to insects, small vertebrates, and even carrion.      There are Clapper Rails, King Rails, Black and Yellow Rails, Virginia Rails, and Sora, the only rail without a rail in its name. King Rails are the largest, at 15 inches tall, and Black Rails the smallest, only 6 inches high — the same height as other rail chicks. Sora and Virginia Rails are most common in the High Plains, although all but the Clapper Rails can sometimes be found around here.      The one color trait that all rails share is a stripy, mottled, black-and-white girdle that wraps under their bellies. Clapper, King, and Virginia Rails have reddish-orange bodies, Soras are grayer, Yellow Rails yellowish, and the little-bitty Black Rails are charcoal gray to black.      Young rails are uniformly black and so likely to slip out of sight, that they might be confused for shadows.      Rails of any type are difficult to see, as they are not only furtive but flat. They’re more likely to be seen at dusk and dawn than any other time. They can sometimes be drawn out of their hideaways by a rail call, authentic or otherwise.      So the next time you’re somewhere near the cattails, look twice for an odd-ball bird, the flat, elusive, fascinating rail. [I learned about rails from David Allen Sibley’s book, Bird Life and Behavior, published by Alfred A. Knopf, and Birds of North America Online.]