Fonseca Rails

I've written here a couple of times before about the Clapper Rails of the Gulf of Fonseca. I've even written a short note documenting breeding in Honduras for El Esmeralda, the bulletin of the Asociación Hondureña de Ornitología (ASHO).

Clapper Rail was first found and documented in the Honduran part of the Gulf of Fonseca in 2010, by Robert Gallardo and Mayron Mejía. In 2012, the species was first reported from the Nicaraguan side of the Gulf by Jens Olek Byskov, Salvadora Morales, Orlando Jarquín and Juan Carlos Alaniz, and in 2013, Oliver Komar, Roselvy Juárez and I found it on the Salvadoran part of the Gulf.

I corresponded about these birds with James Maley, a rail researcher from the University of Wyoming, who expressed an interest in sampling specimens from this population. Together, we wrote a research proposal which we submitted to ICF, the Honduran governmental organization in charge of research permits. James is here right now and we have just finished a week of field work, in which we collected a total of 8 specimens. This series will be used for a taxonomic description of this population.

This week, with the help of playback, we got a sense of how common this species really is in the Gulf of Fonseca. For example, one transect that was about 450 m long had an estimated 15 pairs and 3 single individuals – that's 33 individuals, on a relatively small stretch of mangrove. In some parts, densities seemed so high that we wondered if Clapper Rail was perhaps the second most common species there, after (Mangrove) Yellow Warbler! While few birders or biologists have seen this species in Honduras, most locals that we talked to in the salt ponds and shrimp farms of the area knew the bird well. One of them assisted us with field work, and he told us those birds have been common there for as long as he could remember – at least 40 years!

Remarkable then that this population, apparently never rare, went undiscovered for so long. Given available habitat and abundant food resources, there are probably thousands if not tens of thousands of these rails in the Gulf of Fonseca.

New species for El Salvador: Clapper Rail

Clapper Rail has not been reported from El Salvador, but after recent documentation of the species in the Honduran and Nicaraguan parts of the Gulf of Fonseca, its occurrence on the Salvadoran side of that area was to be expected. Saturday afternoon, Oliver, Roselvy and I set out to find the species in a salt ponds complex called Salinera San Ramón in La Unión, not far from the Honduran border. We were there before in February and even did some unsuccessful playback of Clapper Rail back then.

This time we birded later in the day, and as it got dark, Clappers began to vocalize. We had been playing tapes along the southern side of the salt ponds earlier, when suddenly we heard Clapper Rails giving grunt calls from the mangroves on the northern side. Quickly we walked over a dike to the other side and started recording what sounded like at least three pairs - one close, two further in. Oliver recorded the following vocalizations, documenting the presence of Clapper Rails in El Salvador for the first time:

The next morning, we heard and saw a Clapper Rail in another salinera, La Ostia across the border in Valle, Honduras. We've had this species here several times before, since I first found two adults here last August tending chicks. Sunday I managed a poor quality shot of a bird that briefly came out of the vegetation to inspect my playback.

"documentation shot" of Clapper Rail (in Honduras, not El Salvador)

The first Honduran record dates from 2010, when Robert Gallardo and Mayron Mejía observed and photographed a pair in Choluteca, and the first Nicaraguan record dates from 2012 (van Dort 2013). Although recently discovered, the population in the Gulf of Fonseca may number in the hundreds, if not thousands, given the availability of suitable habitat. Why it has gone undetected for so long is anyone's guess, although I suspect that the relative lack of researcher attention to the Central American mangroves has something to do with it. Or perhaps this population is simply bouncing back from historical depressions after the ban of DDT.

Literature:
Van Dort, J. 2013. Clapper Rail breeding in Honduras. El Esmeralda, Vol II (1): 23–26. Asociación Hondureña de Ornitología (ASHO).

Clapper Rail

Clapper Rail is found in salt marshes and mangrove swamps from the northern United States south to Peru and Brazil, but little is known about its distribution in Latin America (Rush et al. 2012). eBird does not show it for Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras or Nicaragua, and neither do Howell & Webb (1995). Burt Monroe (1968) did not report the species for Honduras either.

I found two adults tending two very young chicks in a salinera in southern Honduras today. I actually first spotted the chicks, little black fluffy things on large feet, before I saw the parents. They looked like they were perhaps less than a week old.

I was not searching for this species, and I obviously lucked into seeing them. They tried to stay under cover of the mangrove vegetation and were difficult to photograph. When the parents became aware of my presence, one of them briefly vocalized, which I was able to record:

Honduran friends tell me there have been two previous reports from Honduras.

Cited literature

Howell, S. N. G. and S. Webb. 1995. A guide to the birds of Mexico and northern Central America. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, UK.

Monroe, B. L. 1968. A Distributional Survey of the Birds of Honduras. Ornithological Monographs No. 7. American Ornithologists' Union. 

Rush, Scott A., Karen F. Gaines, William R. Eddleman and Courtney J. Conway. 2012. Clapper Rail (Rallus longirostris), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online:http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/340