( 
THE SORA RAIL 
By EDWARD HOWE FORBUSH 
The National Association of Audubon Societies 
Educational Leaflet No. 75 
Marshes 
Persist 
In the marsh the wilderness makes its last stand. Civilization 
sweeps away the forest, dams and diverts the streams, cultivates prairie, 
hill, and meadow, traverses the pond in boats, and destroys the native 
birds and mammals, but the marsh remains unconquered to the last. 
Along the Atlantic seaboard, where agriculture and civilization have held 
sway for hundreds of years, stretches of bog-land 
yet persist, even within the limits of cities ; and here 
such shy creatures as inhabited them when Columbus 
discovered America still maintain their homes. Here the great snapping- 
turtle drags its slow length along, here the Bittern may be heard "driving 
its stake,” and here the Rail peers from its age-old fastness — the cover of 
reeds, flags, and sedges. Man dislikes the quaking bog and the miry ooze, 
and so it remains a refuge for the light-footed and defenseless ones that 
can run over its shuddering expanse or crawl in its mud and water. 
Rushes, sedges, waving cattails, and lush water-plants in tangled 
profusion, form a curtain screening the private life of the Rails from 
human view. We hear sounds from behind this screen, and now and 
then a "Mud-hen” peeps out; and so we have come to associate them 
with the steaming summer morass, the pond-weeds, pickerel-weed, and 
the lily-pads, over which, light of weight and splay-footed, they can run 
at will. 
Some of their notes are such as might be expected to come from 
a frog-breeding morass ; others are as sweet and wild as those of the 
Whip-poor-will, or of the Solitary Vireo. Rails have some notes that 
resemble and harmonize with the frog-chorus, such as krek, krek, kuk, 
kuk, kuk, and others more subdued and varied. I may venture to assert 
that no man yet has fully identified all the notes of all the species of 
American Rails, and probably no one man ever will. I have heard 
sounds in the marshes that I could not identify. In 
1889 William Brewster devoted two weeks to an at- 
tempt to see a supposed Rail heard in the Cambridge 
marshes. He never saw it, and the voice is still a mystery, although it 
has been heard many times since and in other places. This bird may have 
been a Yellow Rail, but twice I have heard a wonderful solo from the 
marshes, partly original, and partly in seeming imitation of other birds, 
which, from its quality, I can attribute only to the Sora. This "song” 
was kept up intermittently for several hours, and showed great versatility ; 
297 
Mysterious 
Bird-voices 
