664 
THE WILSON JOURNAL OF ORNITHOLOGY • Vol. 123. No. 4. December 2011 
FIG. 1. An example of the familiar nature of the Wake Island Rail (Gallirallus wakensis ) on Peale Island in the 5 years 
prior to WW II—Stewart Saunders and Harry Frantz, reporters present on Wake for Pan Am’s China Clipper inauguration 
in 1936 with two rails nearly underfoot. Hawaii State Archives photograph album #62, page 21, photograph #14. probably 
taken by John Williams, Honolulu Star Bulletin. 
specimens of Gallirallus wakensis in museums to 
record as much as possible about its appearance, 
size, molt. etc. Detailed specimen data can often 
reveal a great amount about life history as well as 
morphology (e.g., Olson 1999a). Our objective 
was to bring together all existing information we 
could find as a final requiem for the species on the 
70th anniversary of the onset of its extinction. 
December 1941. 
METHODS 
Museum Specimens .—We attempted to trace all 
existing specimens of G. wakensis in museum 
collections (Table 1 >. The first specimens were 
obtained by Japanese collectors for Alan Owston 
(1853-1915), a natural history dealer who oper¬ 
ated out of Yokohama, Japan (Anonymous 1916). 
These were sold to Rothschild (1903:78), who 
mentioned that “a Japanese vessel obtained ten 
specimens in 1892,” but evidently not all 10 were 
made available to him at that time. Hartert 
(1927:22) attributed the specimens to Alan 
Owslon’s collectors and mentioned a “type” 
but, because the Rothschild collection had no 
registry numbers, that specimen cannot be iden¬ 
tified from his publication. He also mentioned 
TABLE 1. Known specimens of Wake Island Rail (Gallirallus wakensis) in museum collections. 
Collector 
Dales 
Prcparaiion lype. number, repository 
Owston’s collectors 
Wetmore Tanager Expedition 
Kenler 
Spencer and Garlough 
Brock 
Lyons 
1892 
28 Jul-3 Aug 1923 
Nov 1935 
4-12 Jun 1937 
22 Aug 1938 
21 Jul. 25 Oct 1939 
Skins: 10 AMNH. 1 BMNH 
Skins: 40 (1 MCZ; 1 ROM): skeletons 3 complete. 
27 trunks < 1 trunk AMNH): fluid 3 complete. 6 
trunks. All USNM except as noted. 
Skin: I BBM 
Skins: 6 USNM 
Skin: t ANSP 
Skins: 3 (2 downy); fluid 2 (downy) MVZ 
