’4 
FOREST AND STREAM 
September, 1919 
POLING THE TIDE FLATS FOR RAIL 
SPORT WITH THE SMALL BORE SHOTGUN AMONG THE REEDS AND RUSHES 
SEARCHING FOR THIS MYSTERIOUS LITTLE DWELLER OF THE MARSHLANDS 
P erhaps of all our land or water- 
fowl none afford our sportmen more 
agreeable amusement or a more de- 
licious repast than the little bird that is 
the subject of our sketch. Rail shoot- 
ing is an amusement lasting only two to 
three hours in the day for four or five 
weeks in each year, but as it occurs 
in the most agreeable and temperate of 
our seasons it is attended with little or 
no fatigue to the gunner and is pursued 
in such places as the birds frequent with 
great eagerness and enthusiasm. 
Under the migratory game laws, the 
open season begins on or about Septem- 
ber 1, in most of the states. There is a 
bag limit which is very proper as form- 
erly they were slaughtered in vast num- 
bers and were in danger of extermina- 
tion. 
The Rail or Sora belongs to a genus 
of birds of which about thirty different 
species are enumerated by naturalists 
over almost every region of the habit- 
able parts of the earth. The common 
species in the order named are the Sora 
{Rallus Carolinus), the Clapper Rail 
{Rallus Crepitans), the Virginia Rail 
(Rallus Virginianus) , and (Rallus Ele- 
gans) the King Rail, the handsomest. 
By EDWARD RUSSELL WILBUR 
It breeds from Central British Colum- 
bia and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, south 
to California, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, 
Illinois, and New Jersey and winters 
south, down through Central America to 
Venezuela and Peru. 
It has been found and identified in 
Bermuda, Greenland and England. Those 
who have flushed this little bird and 
watched his struggle to rise in the reeds 
and the painfully uncertain effort to 
sustain himself for any distance by flight, 
his migration from one locality to an- 
other, reached only across long water and 
land stretches, know him almost as a 
real mystery. 
The natural history of the Rail is to 
most of our sportsmen involved in pro- 
found and inexplicable vagueness. It 
comes from they know not where; no one 
can detect the first moment of its ar- 
rival. All at once the reedy shores and 
grassy marshes of our large rivers and 
bays swarm with them, thousands be- 
ing sometime found within the space of 
a few acres. 
I remember, when a boy, fishing on a 
meadow brook on Long Island and no- 
ticing dozens of little birds running down 
to the stream edge on the muddy banks. 
I had never seen Rail, and took my 
father out the next day to identify them. 
He called them Rail, and had never 
known that they were there. We could 
not make them fly because they ran back 
in the meadow grass where the boat could 
not go, so we contented ourselves with 
bagging them as they ran down on the 
flats at the water’s edge. 
We had several delicious dishes for 
the table, for they were very fat. Rail, 
when forced to fly, seem to fly so feebly 
in such short, fluttering flights amongst 
the reeds as to make it seem almost im- 
possible for them to cover long distances 
by flight. At the first smart frost they 
suddenly disappear as if they had never 
been. Many have heard their common 
note of “crek crek” from sunset to a 
late hour at night, yet have never seen 
a bird, so closely do they lie concealed in 
the grass and reeds of almost every river 
bank and marsh in the country. 
Jumping from a duck blind one time, 
on the shores of Shinnecock Bay, a Rail 
fluttered up from the salt meadow grass 
at my feet. Killing the bird I showed 
it to my companion, a gunner of some 
years’ experience, who told me he had 
never seen one bef.;re, although he lived 
An old photograph of a rail bird hunter being pushed through grass and rice rushes. Note the muzzle loading gun 
