bird clave

As I was walking down the path from the house to the pond I heard a very distinct Morse code signal coming out of the marsh -- click-click click-click-click -- fast and continuous. Two stones being tapped together in rhythm, steady and sure, like a kind of avian clave! After a little double-checking with the xeno-canto web site (the go-to site for bird vocalizations of all sorts), it became obvious that this was the classic 'song' of the YELLOW RAIL! I tried to get out into the marsh to flush the bird but the tide was coming in and I didn't have on my boots.

With or without the visual sighting, I'm sure about this call! This was not the first Yellow Rail on the place. On October 15, 2002, I flushed Yellow Rails twice in two different parts of the marsh. These birds were calling but not with the classic clicking song but with another vocalization that I finally tracked down and identified as the 'descending cackle', a little known contact call. If I hadn't seen these 'Sora-like' rails with the big white patches on their wings in the early light of dawn (see my sketch below), I never would have been able to identify them. This time I had only the call to go by but the quality of the sound was perfect and the October date equally so! These birds are supposed to call mainly at night but it was early morning and overcast; my experience is that rails of all species will call under these conditions. With this evidence -- admittedly 13 years apart -- and some other clues from the years in between, I've just about come to the conclusion that the Yellow Rail is a regular -- if unseen -- migrant hereabouts.

Swarms of White-throated Sparrows and a handful of Golden-crowned Kinglets (the Ruby-crowns seem to have passed through) are also birds of October. Can November be far behind?

This was my sketch from 2002 of a small, darkish rail flushed twice from our marsh. You just do not see the brownish/yellowish coloration of the plumage in the early-morning light but the shape of the wings, the short tail and the startling white patches are definitive.

Eric Salzman