Tahiti rail was found on the South Pacific island of Tahiti by naturalists who were part of the British explorer James Cook’s second voyage around the world. The bird was illustrated by Georg Forster and described by Johann Reinhold Forster. There have been claims that the bird also existed on the nearby island of Mehetia. The extinction of the Tahitirail was probably due to predation by humans and introduced cats and rats.
About Tahiti rail in brief
Tahiti rail was found on the South Pacific island of Tahiti by naturalists who were part of the British explorer James Cook’s second voyage around the world. The bird was illustrated by Georg Forster and described by Johann Reinhold Forster. There have been claims that the bird also existed on the nearby island of Mehetia. The Tahiti rail appears to have been closely related to, and perhaps derived from, the buff-banded rail, and has also been historically confused with the Tongan subspecies of that bird. The extinction of the Tahitirail was probably due to predation by humans and introduced cats and rats. No specimens of this bird have been preserved, but it is presumed that Forster saw a skin. It is presumed to have become extinct some time after 1844 on Tahiti, and maybe as late as the 1930s on Mechetia. In 2012 the English ornithologist and artist Julian P. Hume referred to the claim that theBird lived on Mehetian as \”hearsay\” but regarded it as a possibility that it lived there and on other outlying islands.
In 2001 the English writer Errol Fuller stated that unlike some other \”hypothetical extinct species\” only known from old accounts, the Tahitian rail was documented for there to be no doubt that it existed. The extinct bird was called Oomnaa or Eboonàa by Polynesians and Oomèia-Keteòw on Tonga, though he specified only Tahiti and nearby islands as being part of its range. It was also known as Rallus pacificus by the English naturalist John Latham in 1785, and the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin formally named the bird in 1789. The 1844 publication of Forster’s description of the bird suggested the bird was a variety of the Tonga rail, which was erroneously listed as a variety of the Tah itian rail by John Frederick Miller. In 1967 the American ornithologists James Greenway and Phillip L. Bruner said the bird may have also existed near Tahiti a generation ago, as reported to Greenway by an amateur naturalist Anthony Curtiss.
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This page is based on the article Tahiti rail published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
