NORTH AMERICAN MARSH BIRDS 303 



PORZANA CAROUNA (Linnaeus) 

 SORA RAIL 



HABITS 



The sora or Carolina rail is unquestionably the rail of North Amer- 

 ica. It is the most widely distributed and the best known of its tribe. 

 Throughout its wide breeding range its cries are among the most char- 

 acteristic voices of the marshes. During some part of the year it is 

 more or less common in practically every Province in Canada, every 

 State in the United States, and in much of Central America and the 

 West Indies. It is the most popular of the rails among sportsman 

 and, when one speaks of rail shooting, he generally refers to this spe- 

 cies. Being a prolific breeder, it is astonishingly abundant in favored 

 localities during the fall migration. 



The sora, like the other rails, is a denizen of the oozy marsh; and 

 for this reason it has continued to live and breed in the midst of civi- 

 lization long after so many of the wilder and shyer birds have been 

 driven away. Man clears away the forests, cultivates the prairies, 

 cleans up the bushy hillsides and mows the meadow hay, forcing the 

 birds that live there to move elsewhere; but he dislikes the quaking 

 bog, which is perhaps too low to drain, and so he leaves it until the 

 last, when the land becomes valuable enough to fill in for houselots. 

 Many such little swamps and bogs, which had long persisted near the 

 heart of some big city, have been filled in within my memory. And 

 the rails, Virginia and sora, have stuck to them to the last; so well 

 hidden were they in the seclusion of the marsh, that they little cared 

 for the activities of civilization so close around them; the marsh was 

 their world and supplied all their needs. 



In my college days, in the late eighties, such a bog still existed 

 near the center of Brookline, where a friend and I used to wade 

 around in the mud up to our waists, collecting rails eggs; then, drip- 

 ping with mud and water, we would retiu^n to his house, jump into 

 the bath tub with our clothes on and wash off the mud, much to his 

 mother's disgust. In those days the Fresh Fond marshes in Cam- 

 bridge were an oasis of wilderness in a desert of civilization and both 

 the Virginia and sora rails nested there in abundance. Both of these 

 marshes were filled in and obliterated by human "improvements." 



As late as 1908, Mr. J. A. Weber (1909) found both Virginia and 

 sora rails nesting on the northern portion of the Manhattan Island 

 in New York City. He writes: 



The marshes inhabited by the rails are situated at the northern portion of 

 Manhattan Island and extend northward and eastward from the foot of the hill 

 at Fort George (One hundred and ninetieth Street and Amsterdam Avenue). 

 These marshes formerly lined the shore of the Harlem River, but through street- 

 improvements have been separated from the river and cut up into small areas 



