Water rail

The water rail is a bird of the rail family which breeds in well-vegetated wetlands across Europe, Asia and North Africa. Northern and eastern populations are migratory, but this species is a permanent resident in the warmer parts of its breeding range. It has mainly brown upperparts and blue-grey underparts, black barring on the flanks, long toes, a short tail and a long reddish bill.

About Water rail in brief

The water rail is a bird of the rail family which breeds in well-vegetated wetlands across Europe, Asia and North Africa. Northern and eastern populations are migratory, but this species is a permanent resident in the warmer parts of its breeding range. The adult is 23–28 cm long, and, like other rails, has a body that is flattened laterally, allowing it easier passage through the reed beds it inhabits. It has mainly brown upperparts and blue-grey underparts, black barring on the flanks, long toes, a short tail and a long reddish bill. The former subspecies R.  indicus, has distinctive markings and a call that is very different from the pig-like squeal of the western races, and is now usually split as a separate species, the brown-cheeked rail. This species can breed after its first year, and it normally raises two clutches in each season. Water rails are omnivorous, feeding mainly on invertebrates during summer and berries or plant stems towards winter. They are territorial even after breeding, and will aggressively defend feeding areas in winter. These rails are vulnerable to flooding or freezing conditions, loss of habitat and predation by mammals and large birds. The introduced American mink has exterminated some island populations, but overall the species’ huge range and large numbers mean that it is not considered to be threatened. The rails are a bird family comprising nearly 150 species. Although the origins of the group are lost in antiquity, the largest number of species and the most primitive forms are found in the Old World, suggesting that this family originated there.

However, the genus Rallus, the group of long-billed reed bed specialists to which the water rail belongs, arose in the New World. Its Old World members, the water, African and Madagascan rails, form a superspecies, and are thought to have evolved from a single invasion from across the Atlantic. It became extinct at the same time as human arrival on the island, between 16, 16, and 5,300 BC. The nominate race of water rail, Eivissa, is now a very rare resident on very rare islands on the coast of eastern Europe. The oldest known fossils of an ancestral water rail are bones from Carpathia dated to the Pliocene. By the late Pleistocene, two million years ago, the fossil evidence suggests that the waterrail was present across most of its present range. This species is well-recorded, with over 30 records from Bulgaria alone, and many others from across southern Europe and China. A rail from Eivissus eivissensis was probably smaller but more robust, and probably had poorer flight abilities than the rail, and lacked terrestrial mammals, and this distinctive form presumably descended from its continental relative, the island mammals, from the Quaternary. Males typically weigh 114–164 g, and females are slightly lighter at 92–164  g.

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