Wake Island Rail

The Wake Island Rail was a small, flightless bird that lived nowhere on Earth but the remote Pacific atoll of Wake, where it was the only native land bird. Cut off for countless generations on an island with no ground predators, it had quietly surrendered the power of flight, a fate shared by many rails that reach oceanic islands and no longer need to escape into the air. It ranged across the atoll's three islets, Wake, Wilkes and Peale, threading through low scrub and grass on strong legs.

In life it was a modest bird: greyish to olive brown above, finely barred with white below, with a slim body built for slipping through dense cover and stubby wings that could no longer lift it. That tameness and helplessness, harmless for millennia, became fatal in the space of a few years. During the Second World War a large Japanese garrison was stranded on Wake under a tightening Allied blockade, and as supplies ran out the starving soldiers hunted the trusting rail for food. By the time the war ended in 1945 the bird was gone. It is one of the clearest, saddest examples of how quickly an isolated island species can vanish once its refuge is breached.

Because the Wake Island Rail is extinct and was rarely photographed alive, its identification now belongs to museum skins, old notes and a handful of drawings. It was a small, brownish rail with fine white barring on the underparts, greatly reduced wings and no ability to fly. Crucially, it was the only land bird native to Wake Atoll, so on that single speck of land, location alone was enough to name it. No observer today will ever field-identify one, but the surviving specimens preserve a clear picture of what set it apart.

Male vs. female

The sexes were not well documented in life, and the species disappeared before anyone made a careful field study of it. From the surviving specimens, males and females appear to have looked broadly alike in their greyish-brown, barred plumage, as is typical of many Hypotaenidia rails, where any difference between the sexes is slight. Males may have averaged marginally larger, but no reliable, consistent plumage difference was ever recorded. In practice an observer on the atoll would have had no easy way to sex a bird by sight, and today only measurements of museum skins hint at the modest size range within the species.

Juveniles

Almost nothing was written about young Wake Island Rails. By analogy with related flightless and near-flightless island rails, newly hatched chicks were almost certainly covered in dark, sooty-black down and able to run and follow their parents within hours, as rail chicks generally are. Juveniles moulting toward adult plumage would have shown duller, less crisply barred underparts than fully grown birds. Because the species vanished before modern study, these details rest on comparison with close living relatives rather than direct observation, and should be read as informed inference rather than certain fact.

Very little of the Wake Island Rail's voice was ever recorded, and no audio survives. Early accounts describe little beyond that it was a quiet, secretive bird of the undergrowth. Like other flightless island rails in the genus Hypotaenidia, it is thought to have produced short, sharp calls together with clucking, chattering or grunting notes used between birds in cover. Any fuller description of its song or alarm calls was lost with the bird itself, so we can only reason from its close, still-living relatives such as the Buff-banded Rail, which gives squeaks, sharp kik notes and creaking calls.

The Wake Island Rail was found nowhere on Earth except Wake Atoll, a tiny, low, V-shaped coral atoll in the western Pacific roughly two-thirds of the way from Hawaii to Guam. It occurred across all three of the atoll's islets, Wake, Wilkes and Peale, which together enclose a shallow lagoon and amount to only a few square kilometres of land in total.

Within that minuscule world the rail lived in the low scrub, grasses, and dense tangled vegetation that covered the drier ground, foraging on the atoll floor and among the roots and stems. Such an extraordinarily confined range, an entire species restricted to a single atoll a fraction the size of a small town, left it with no margin for error. There was no neighbouring island to fall back on, no other population to replenish losses. When conditions on Wake turned catastrophic during the war, the bird had literally nowhere else on the planet to be.

The Wake Island Rail is believed to have been a ground-foraging omnivore, the usual role of small island rails. It gleaned small invertebrates, including insects and their larvae, along with mollusks and other tiny creatures picked from the ground, leaf litter and low vegetation. To this it added seeds and plant matter, giving it a flexible, opportunistic diet.

On a small atoll, food would have shifted with the seasons and with what the shore and scrub provided, and a mixed diet of animal and plant material would have helped the bird cope. Some accounts suggest it also scavenged along the strand line and around any refuse, which may partly explain why it was so tame and so easily approached, a trait that turned deadly once hungry people arrived in numbers.

The breeding habits of the Wake Island Rail were never properly studied, and much of what can be said rests on comparison with related rails. As a ground-dwelling, flightless species it is presumed to have built a simple, concealed nest low in dense grass or scrub, laying a small clutch of eggs. Like other rails, its chicks were almost certainly precocial, hatching well developed and able to leave the nest and follow their parents very soon after emerging.

That reliance on the ground for everything, nest, eggs, and vulnerable chicks, was the same weakness that doomed the adults. On an atoll suddenly overrun and stripped for food, ground nests offered no protection at all. Eggs and downy young would have been just as accessible to hungry soldiers, and to any rats and other introduced animals, as the tame grown birds, so no part of the life cycle could escape the pressure that drove the species out.

The Wake Island Rail is extinct, so it can never be attracted or seen. What you can do is seek out its living relatives, the flightless and near-flightless Pacific rails that still survive and let you glimpse what this bird was like. Here is where and how to encounter its closest kin.

• Look for the Buff-banded Rail, thought to be a close relative, across Australia, New Zealand and many Pacific islands, where it walks boldly along wetland edges, gardens and shorelines.
• Visit Guam or Rota in the Mariana Islands to see the Guam Rail (ko'ko'), a flightless rail brought back from the brink by captive breeding and reintroduction, a hopeful mirror image of Wake's loss.
• Explore New Zealand reserves and tracks to meet the Weka, a large, curious flightless rail that readily approaches walkers and shows the same island loss of flight.
• Support island conservation and predator-eradication projects, which are the single most effective way to keep the surviving flightless rails from following the Wake Island Rail.
• See the story firsthand in natural history museums holding rail specimens, where preserved skins of extinct island birds bring their brief histories vividly close.

• Buff-banded Rail: A widespread, still-flying Pacific rail thought to be a close relative and similar in size and barred pattern
• Guam Rail: Another Pacific island rail, flightless and driven to near-extinction, but saved by captive breeding and reintroduction
• Weka: A larger flightless rail of New Zealand, showing the same island loss of flight seen in the Wake Island Rail