© 1998, Doug Von Gausig 5/21/98
This is a tale of an invisible bird. Not that the bird couldn't be seen if he would stand in front of you in the open - he could, but he won't. This bird is the endangered Yuma Clapper Rail, Rallus longirostris yumanensis, and he lives deep in the marshy netherworlds of the desert Southwest. He loves the thickest stands of Cattails and Sedges and Bulrush, and he's not at all curious about the world outside this herbal womb. Only the luckiest of observers will ever see one. This particular story unfolds in Tavasci Marsh, near Clarkdale in Central Arizona.
Tavasci Marsh is a "recovering" spring-fed, freshwater marsh, which had been drained and "reclaimed" for cattle grazing until about seven years ago. The area was historically a marsh that had been used for water and hunting for hundreds of years by the ancient indigenous people, the Sinagua Indians, who also occupied the adjacent Tuzigoot pueblo, now a National Monument. Seven years ago the Arizona Game and Fish Commission and the landowners, Phelps-Dodge Mining Corp., decided to allow the marsh to return to its historic form, and almost immediately the Beavers moved in to do their re-engineering job. The marsh has been an exciting, dynamic ecosystem since then, busy speciating and sorting out who gets to live there and in what numbers. This is the habitat that I began to record in earnest in the summer of 1997.
A marsh, as you may know, is a place of sounds, a place where the citizens communicate cross-specifically and constantly, and primarily by vocalization. You see, in a marsh you can't see. Your ears and voice are how you gather and disseminate information, especially about threats. Frogs usually start the chain of alarm when there is an intruder or a danger, and that alarm is picked up and passed along by the Blackbirds, the Marsh Wrens, the Herons and, especially, the Rails. The Rails are the loudest, most insistent town criers in this deliciously diverse habitat. The Rails have a way of spreading the word that I call a "synchophony" (to hear one, press here). It may start with the grunt of a Virginia Rail (Rallus limicola) and quickly spread to the Soras (Porzana carolina) in the neighborhood, who begin their delightful descending whinnies. Thence it moves to the Moorhens (Gallinula chloropus) with their jungle-like laugh and American Coots (Fulica americana) who squeak and quack and give their coda to the performance.
In Tavasci Marsh there was another player in these synchophonies, one with an insistent, strident, rasping call that could only be another Rail of some sort. The call was a loud, descending "Yak Yak Yak Yak" (which is the second call heard in the above "synchophony") that didn't match any Rail I'd ever seen out there. The queer thing was that it also didn't match any Rail I could hear on commercial recordings. Nothing like it was available anywhere. I searched the web, where there are some excellent sites to listen to birdcalls. I searched through Stokes and Audubon and Peterson CDs and heard nothing like my bird. Was it an atypical Virginia Rail? No, Virginia Rails are well-known and well-documented - they don't YAK YAK YAK, and this sound came from all over the marsh, not just from one or two birds. This bird had to be large - larger than a Virginia, by its volume. It overpowered all other Rails in the marsh.
Now I love a mystery, and this one was particularly tasty - it involved spending hours and hours in one of my favorite places on earth, doing something I love to do (recording) and getting to play ornithological detective! My search soon centered on the Clapper or King Rails - the size, habitat and associations were correct, but the Clapper is a salt-water bird and the King would be way out of his territory. That left only an isolated and endangered subspecies of the Clapper rail, the Yuma Clapper, as a viable possibility. The bird was known to exist only in the freshwater marshy areas of the lower Colorado River, a few places in Arizona's Salt River and the Salton Sea in Southern California. Estimations of the total population varied from 700 to under 1000 birds, and it had never been recorded this far north or this far from its traditional breeding area.
Since I've been operating my own Bird Sounds web page, I've accumulated quite a number of recordists as friends all around the world, and I began to send my mystery sound to these fine folks hoping one of them would recognize it. It took months and many, many inquiries and dead ends, but finally I got the attention of Greg Clark (the editor of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology Newsletter, The Recorder) and he took it to the Arizona Bird Records Committee where some of the members thought the sound was a Yuma Clapper Rail. This is where the story begins!
There is, in this story, a very significant fact: The area adjacent to Tavasci Marsh has been planned for 10 years to be developed as a housing development of 900 homes and an 18-hole golf course. This development would occupy the area surrounding Peck's lake, which is the other half of the Tavasci Marsh "oxbow". The storm-water drainage plan for the development included collecting runoff from all the homes and associated commercial areas and funneling it all into Peck's Lake and thence through Tavasci Marsh. The EPA, Phelps-Dodge (the developer), the USFWS and the Army Corps of Engineers had done their impact studies and were within a few weeks of issuing their final permits for the plan when I announced the presence of this new endangered species in the marsh (and later in Peck's Lake, too). The Yuma Clapper is a bird that is particularly sensitive to pollutants and water level fluctuations, especially in the spring nesting season. They are also extraordinarily susceptible to domestic dogs and cats and human intrusion. The bird would not be happy about 900 homes, gas stations, dogs and cats, and storm water laden with every lawn and golf course fertilizer and herbicide and insecticide known to man being flushed through its habitat.
So we wrote and called and harangued until the EPA and FWS could no longer ignore what we had there. The decision was finally made to reinitiate all environmental consultations since prior impact studies had neglected the presence of this species completely. The development is stalled right now, and the Rails are happily breeding and expanding their territory into mine. If the developers do build, it will only be in a way that is conducive to the continued success of the Yuma Clapper Rail in their back yards. I must say that I do not believe that previous studies intentionally omitted the Rail, they just didn't ever see it, and practically nobody knows what it sounds like. It is the invisible bird!
The moral to this story is that we, as recordists, can make a difference in the way things happen around us. There are lots of Ainvisible@ species out there - frogs and toads and birds and insects that, for all practical purposes, can only be detected by the sounds they make. And some of these are from tiny populations of endangered animals. Without the efforts of curious recordists like you they may fade forever from the scene, and we can't afford that, can we?
I want to thank some of those who were so helpful in identifying the Yuma Clapper, writing letters, spreading the word and general rabble-rousing in the effort to get the environmental impact studies reopened: Roger Radd, local ornithological whiz; the Northern Arizona Audubon Society; Greg Clark and Tim Price; Dick Todd (the world authority of Yuma Clapper Rails); and Becky, who puts up with me and my passion and edits everything I write.
© Doug Von Gausig 5/28/98