Laysan Rail

Laysan Rail ( Porzana palmeri ) with young

The Laysan Rail ( Porzana palmeri ) is an extinct flightless bird from the island of Laysan, which belongs to the group of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

Appearance and Body

The flightless Rail was 15 cm long and had very little rounded wings. While airworthy Rail birds usually have eleven primaries, the Laysan Rail ( Porzana palmeri ) had only eight. The eighth was about as long as the erste.1 2 3

Way of life

The Laysan Rail ate mainly insects and bird eggs, carrion addition, rare plants and seeds. The insects they caught many times with its beak from the Luft.1 2 4

They were very lively and often jumped on the table in order to look for pieces of meat. For holes that were 1.50 m deep, they came no more heraus.2 The Rail was extremely curious and tame. She had no serious natural predators on the island. Palmer wrote at the time that he began by spreading its network on the ground, with the result that the birds arrived immediately and nachschauten what that is. Even stranger sounds to our ears that a Rail returned to their nest during a photographer in 60 cm distance his apparatus hired to photograph the nest. The photographer took the Rail from the nest, but she returned twice almost immediately back into the Nest.1 2

Reproduction

The nest of Laysanrallen was built under thick tufts of grass. It was a shallow bowl, but respected the Rail to the fact that the nest was well hidden under tufts of grass or bushes if necessary, and built himself a better disguise for her nest. They also made ​​sure that the access to the nest was not, apparently, to protect themselves against nest predators. The eggs were 3.1 × 2.1 cm in size and were incubated from May to June. While squacco species lay often six to ten eggs from the mainland, was the nest of Laysanralle only an average of three Eiern.1 2

The black bedunten gelbschnäbeligen boys slipped in June. They quickly learned to be self-sufficient and could within five days as nimble race as the parents. In the population in Midway the chicks hatched in March, the entire development is likely sein.2 three months earlier expired so there

Extinction

The Rail was first observed by the crew of the Moller, who visited the island in 1828. They were quite frequently found in 1891 on Laysan, it had a population of about 2,000 pieces and a few specimens were captured by Rothschild. 1892, the species was benannt.2

Originally Laysanralle was limited to about 5 sq km island of Laysan. Beginning of the 20th century it was angesiedelt.2 successfully on the Midway Islands

The next 30 years survived the Laysan Rail on, although for 15 years Guano was mined at this time. Then, however led the releasing of rabbits by the workers to the fact that almost all of the vegetation of the island was eroded and destroyed. This led in part by lack of food, partly due to insufficient coverage from birds of prey to the disappearance of three land birds: the Laysan breed of South Seas warbler (also Laysan warbler called ) ( Acrocephalus familiaris familiaris), the Laysan Apapane ( Himathione sanguinea freethii ( fraithii ) ) and the Laysan Rail. 1923, most of the rabbits was exterminated, the rest died of natural causes aus.2

A back settlement, which was tried in the same year with birds of the Midway Islands, did not succeed. Then the Rails died from rats and destruction of the shrubbery on the Midway Islands aus.2

Origin

The next of kin of the Rail is the Baillon's Crake ( Porzana pusilla ) .5

The Laysanralle was probably less than 125,000 years into a flightless Vogel.6

Swell

• 1 Walter Rothschild. The avifauna of Laysan and the Neighbouring islands with a complete history to date of the birds of the Hawaiian possession. London: R. H. Porter, 1893-1900.
• 2 Paul H. Baldwin: The Life History of the Laysan Rail. The Condor, Vol 49, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 1947), pp. 14-21 doi: 10.2307/1364423
• 4 J. Mark Jenkins: Natural History of the Guam Rail. The Condor, Vol 81, No. 4 (Nov., 1979), pp. 404-408. doi: 10.2307/1366967
• 5 Beth Slikas, Storrs L Olson, Robert C. Fleischer (2002) Rapid, independent evolution of flightlessness in four species of Pacific Iceland rails ( Rallidae ): an analysis based on mitochondrial sequence data. Journal of Avian Biology 33 ( 1), 5? 14 doi: 10.1034/j.1600-048X.2002.330103.x
• 6 Brian K. McNab: Minimizing energy expenditure Facilitates vertebrate persistence on oceanic islands. Ecology Letters, (2002 ) 5: 693-704