USGS California Clapper Rail Study - ©ingrid
California Clapper Rail Study – San Francisco Bay Area
We scanned the shoreline at Arrowhead Marsh, noting the sturdy row of super-pricey scopes — the Zeiss and Swarovski kind — where the glass is so precise, you swear you’ve never seen anything right with your own bare eyes.
Throngs of birders had, in fact, planned an outing to Arrowhead Marsh on the very day the USGS study team arrives — the team responsible for banding and radio tracking the remaining thousand or so California Clapper Rails in the Bay Area.
Zeiss Birding Scope
Birders swoop in at high tide — a major draw at Arrowhead, one of the last bastions of the poor, popular, and endangered California Clapper Rail. The rising water makes rail viewing a simpler task, given the reduce patches of reeds in which the rails tend to cloister themselves. And this tide was high and bold, almost seeping over the shore. We felt as though we were walking below a dike.
California Clapper Rail in Reeds - ©ingrid
California Clapper Rail -©ingrid
California Clapper Rail - ©ingrid
Camo Kayak - ©ingrid
California Clapper Rail Becomes Endangered
Through 1915, according to Save the Bay (San Francisco), the California Clapper Rail was a menu delicacy. The bird was hunted to near extinction (a sad but common fate for Bay Area and U.S. species). Additional and significant pressures came (and continue to come) from human development, drained wetlands and increased terrestrial predation. With marshes and wetlands reduced in scope, land predators had a much easier time accessing the vulnerable rails whose numbers came to an all-time low of around 500.
California Clapper Rails are now protected under the Endangered Species Act — a highly effective protective legal umbrella for threatened species, in spite of the Bush Administration’s attempts to eviscerate the act’s population-saving mechanisms.
Protected wetland habitats such as the ones restored at Arrowhead Marsh are critical to the Clapper Rail’s survival:
Arrowhead Marsh - ©ingrid
Hugh and I stood by with our [comparatively] tiny 70-300 Olympus lens — next to a Cannon 500mm that might as well have been the Hubble for the way it dwarfed our glass. The Hubble sherpa was a salty photog, draped in binoculars, another camera body with huge lens, a bag and a smoke. It’s a wonder he could hussle for his shots. But he could. I’m suitably humbled in this macho arena of weighted glass and crop factors.
The rail capture is an ordeal to be sure — for the scientists and for the rails. Given the birds’ slippery evasions and ability to stay submerged for minutes at a time, it’s a wonder any were caught and examined. But they were. It’s a good guess the rails were terrified. But I’d prefer to think of them as annoyed. That’s where anthropomorphizing becomes emotional self-defense. Life’s a bitch for endangered species, what can I say?
California Clapper Rail - ©ingrid
The exam includes a variety of biometric measures, including (in some cases) a blood draw and a culmen measure (a bill measurement) with handy calipers.
And then, in the same way raptors are calmed by the head cover of a falcon hood, the California Clapper Rail is soothed with a lovely head scarf . . . in the form of a baby sock.
California Clapper Rail Study - Photo © Hugh - Click image for Original
The end result is the rail’s release, often tagged with a radio “backpack.” Researchers can then track and follow the rail’s movements, to assess its range, its numbers, its life hazards, and also to determine the best ways to tackle non-native grasses that tend to encroach upon and diminish critical Clapper Rail habitat.
California Clapper Rail Study - ©ingrid
