The water rail is one of the most elusive birds, rarely seen but often heard by those who frequent secluded, marshy ground. If you want to see them, patience is a useful virtue. Photographers Eamonn Brennan and Joe Byrne spent many hours one Sunday in early January, waiting in the hide at Cabragh Wetlands for the shy little creature to walk into their camera lenses. Several times the bird was on the point of emerging, when something would scare him back into the undergrowth – perhaps a family walking round the ponds, or someone approaching the hide a little too noisily. With a sigh of resignation and infinite patience, Eamonn and Joe settled down to wait all over again and in the end were rewarded with fine pictures of this mysterious and secretive bird.
The water rail is closely related to the moorhen and coot family, with the very rare corncrake and bittern as cousins. It is slightly larger than a garden thrush, with a pointed red and black wader’s beak, long legs and toes, a tail cocked upwards like a wren, and a rather sideways-flattened body, which apparently makes it easier to escape into thickets of tangled grass. His back, head, wings and tail are sandy-brown, speckled black, while his flanks are striped black and white, and his chest ash-gray. Male and female are almost identical.
The call of the water rail is very hard to pin down. Its piercing cry has been likened to squealing piglets and “heart-rending and fearsome groans”, but they can also purr like a cat and croak like a frog. They buzz, grunt, screech and squeak, “their wheezy grunting (is) the sort of noise a hedgehog makes when grubbing in the dusk” and on occasion they can reverberate like a klaxon horn, or even sound “like a recalcitrant cork being repeatedly and forcefully drawn from a bottle”. For those of you still uncertain what it sounds like, this description should clarify things for you: “… incessantly uttered purring noise likened to the purring of a contented squirrel”. That’s clear, then!
The water rail is so elusive, that in effect he is routinely invisible. But where you have marshy ground, reed beds, sedge and ditches, there is every chance that they will thrive. The more tangled the undergrowth the better. Cabragh Wetlands are ideal for them, with perfect cover in the thick vegetation. Their movements have an almost rodent-like character as they scuttle into a thicket or drain. Their nests are normally deep in a sedge tussock or on watery vegetation, with seven to ten eggs laid in May and June. After three weeks of incubation by both parents, they hatch. If there is danger, the female has been known to carry her nestlings in her beak, one by one, to safety. The young can fly at about two months old.
In general they eat anything, using that long beak to dig out earthworms and catch small fish and crustacea, beetles, water boatmen, leeches, earwigs, watercress roots, seeds from grass and weeds. One was trained to jump for worms from the end of a fishing rod! They also eat caddis flies, which will not be popular if they finish off the two very rare species living in Cabragh Wetlands and nowhere else in Ireland! In weather as bad as we have experienced recently, they can be more obviously predatory. Nine bird species are known to be prey to the water rail. It has two methods of attack; firstly it will seize its victim and hold it under the water till it drowns, and secondly it will use that long slim beak as a sword, driving it through small victims like the wren and impaling them. Quail and greenfinch have been recorded as prey. It seems that this sort of aggression is so out of character that other birds do not anticipate an attack and thus are relatively easy victims.
A rare but very valued resident of Cabragh Wetlands, there are no more than a few thousand pairs of water rail in Ireland and Britain. We must preserve their habitats.
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