Virginia Rail

About the Virginia Rail

"Thin as a rail" is about this bird. The Virginia Rail is a marsh skulker built like a blade - its body laterally compressed so it can slip between cattail stems without moving them - equipped with long toes for walking on floating vegetation and a long, slightly curved reddish bill for probing the muck.

It is a handsome bird when it finally shows: rusty-orange below, gray-cheeked, with black-and-white barred flanks and that red bill. The trouble is the showing. Rails live inside dense marsh vegetation and would rather run than fly, threading invisible tunnels through the reeds. Most encounters are voice only - a descending series of pig-like grunts, or a sharp "kid-ick kid-ick" from spring wetlands.

In much of Texas the Virginia Rail is a winter resident and migrant, hiding in cattail ponds, wet ditches, and marsh edges. Patient birders learn the trick: sit quietly at a marsh opening at dawn, and hunger will eventually pull one out to the muddy edge for a few unguarded minutes.

Photographing one in the open, as here, is genuinely earned - a bird that spends its life making sure nobody sees it.