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THE WILSON JOURNAL OF ORNITHOLOGY • Vol. 123. No. 4. December 2011 
of a letter of conveyance to S. Dillon Ripley dated 
28 July 1970. This was intended for Ripley’s use 
in compiling his work on the rails of the world 
(Ripley 1977). There is no evidence of any 
information having been derived from it in 
Ripley’s book, however, in which the only 
information from Wetmore was taken directly 
from his field journal. Wetmore’s manuscript 
contains a few observations that were not included 
in the published notes and we have cited it in the 
text as Wetmore (1970). 
The most important untapped sources of 
information on the Wake Island Rail are the 
unpublished documents of Torrey Lyons. Lyons 
was hired as a gardener by Pan Am to grow 
vegetables, mostly hydroponically. for use by the 
airline’s hotel on Wake. He was a graduate of the 
Department of Botany, University of California. 
Berkeley, and was trained in ornithology at the 
Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (Rauzon et al. 
2008b). He kept notes on the birds of Wake Island 
from 1939 to 1941, including many valuable and 
singular observations of the rail, of which he took 
unique photographs. His original journal is in the 
collection of field journals at MVZ. We cite his 
journal in the text as Lyons (with the appropriate 
year, day: and month), and in the Literature Cited 
as Lyons (1939-1941). His notes contain numer¬ 
ous abbreviations and idiosyncrasies of spelling 
and punctuation that we have at times altered for 
clarity. Observations attributed to Lyons not in 
quotation marks are as close to direct quotes as it 
was possible for us to make them without the use 
of a forest of sic's and brackets. We also obtained 
previously unknown rail photographs in January’ 
2005 from Lyons' daughter, Tada Lyons Darsie, 
of Santa Rosa, California. 
PHYSIOGRAPHY AND HISTORY OF 
WAKE ISLAND 
Wake Atoll (19 18' 55" N, 166 38'21" E) is a 
northern outlier of the Marshall Islands, despite its 
extreme isolation, 603 km from the nearest 
landfall at Taongi Atoll (Fig. 2). Also known as 
