Trying to spot a Virginia rail in the open expanses of a Spencer Island marsh is not exactly a fool’s errand, but it’s not a good bet, either.
Of course, betting big money on Cleveland to win the last three games of the NBA finals against the team that won the most games in a regular season — ever — wouldn’t have been a rational option, either.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to actually see a Virginia rail during the Secretive Wetland Bird Survey for the Puget Sound Bird Observatory.
I just had to use my ears, an auditory approach to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.
I was equipped with an MP3 player, a small speaker and a GPS unit (yes, I have a dumb phone). On this day, I went to three pre-selected sites, started the MP3 player, held up the speaker and listened to the pre-recorded calls of the Virginia rail, sora, American bittern and green heron and hoped for a response.
At the first site, about 20 swallows were anything but secretive. At the second site, I provided entertainment to an otter and a violet-green swallow, but didn’t hear a peep out of the four targets. I was listening to the silence between two of the MP3 versions of their calls when I noticed the otter swimming toward me, pausing, watching and listening.
It stayed for the next call, too. But as soon as the third digital marsh bird call came out, the otter turned and quickly paddled away. As it was leaving, an olive-green swallow landed in a branch not far away and gave me 30 seconds of vocal scolding for … whatever. Replies from the marsh birds: zero.
But success came at the third site with the wikki-wikki-wikki sounds of a Virginia rail. It’s hard to translate bird sounds into words. Call it kid-dik if you will, or ticket-ticket, or tic-tic-tic. Another version of the rail’s vocalization has been described as a series of pig-like grunts.
The Virginia rail is particularly interesting physically. If you spot one head on, you’ll see the origin of “as thin as a rail.” Nature has provided a laterally compressed (slightly flattened) body that gives them the highest chance to slip between marsh grasses, one foot directly in front of the other, without giving away their positions.
Ornithologists have determined that its forehead feathers have adapted so that they won’t immediately be damaged by pushing through dense vegetation. If necessary, it can also swim underwater for a short distance, using its wings.
This hen-like rail is a little of this and a little of that, color-wise. It’s a combination of brown-and-black mottled upper parts, rusty breast, and black-and-white barred belly, topped off with a black-crowned head, gray cheeks, a light stripe over the eye and a long curved-down bill, all of it supported by orange-brown legs.
I heard a sora in another section of the Spencer Island marshes on an earlier visit. They often share a marsh but have slightly different diets. Both are omnivores, but while the sora eats more seeds, the rail prefers using its long bill to probe in the mud, or spear small prey, sampling a diet of insects, worms, snails, and dragonflies.
The smaller sora, the most common rail in North America, has a dark-tipped yellow bill. It maintains a stable population despite being hunted because it has a high reproductive rate.
While a group of soras are known as an ache or a whinny, a group of Virginia rails are known as a reel.
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
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