Mangrove rail

The mangrove rail (Rallus longirostris) is a species of bird in the family Rallidae. It is found in Central and South America. It was formerly considered conspecific with the clapper rail (Rallus crepitans).

Mangrove rail
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Gruiformes
Family: Rallidae
Genus: Rallus
Species:
R. longirostris
Binomial name
Rallus longirostris
Boddaert, 1783

Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical mangrove forests and coastal saline lagoons. It is threatened by habitat loss.

Taxonomy

The mangrove rail was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1781 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen obtained in French Guiana.[2] The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.[3] Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Rallus longirostris in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.[4] The genus Rallus had been erected in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae.[5] The specific epithet longirostris combines the Latin longus meaning "long" and -rostris meaning "-billed".[6]

The mangrove rail was formerly considered to be conspecific with the clapper rail (Rallus crepitans). The two species were split based on the results of molecular phylogenetic study published in 2013.[7][8]

Eight subspecies are recognised:[8]

  • Rallus longirostris phelpsi Wetmore, 1941 – northeast Colombia, northwest Venezuela
  • Rallus longirostris dillonripleyi Phelps Jr & Aveledo, 1987 – northeast Venezuela
  • Rallus longirostris margaritae Zimmer, JT & Phelps, 1944 – Margarita Island (Venezuela)
  • Rallus longirostris pelodramus Oberholser, 1937 – Trinidad
  • Rallus longirostris longirostris Boddaert, 1783 – coast of the Guianas
  • Rallus longirostris crassirostris Lawrence, 1871 – coast of Brazil
  • Rallus longirostris cypereti Taczanowski, 1878 – coastal southwest Colombia to northwest Peru
  • Rallus longirostris berryorum Maley et al., 2016 – coastal west Honduras, possibly to west Nicaragua and northwest Costa Rica[9]

References
  1. BirdLife International (2014). "Rallus longirostris". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2014.
  2. Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc de (1781). "Le râle a long bec". Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (in French). Volume 15. Paris: De L'Imprimerie Royale. pp. 251–252.
  3. Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc de; Martinet, François-Nicolas; Daubenton, Edme-Louis; Daubenton, Louis-Jean-Marie (1765–1783). "Râle à long bec, de Cayenne". Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle. Volume 9. Paris: De L'Imprimerie Royale. Plate 849.
  4. Boddaert, Pieter (1783). Table des planches enluminéez d'histoire naturelle de M. D'Aubenton : avec les denominations de M.M. de Buffon, Brisson, Edwards, Linnaeus et Latham, precedé d'une notice des principaux ouvrages zoologiques enluminés (in French). Utrecht. p. 52, Number 849.
  5. Linnaeus, Carl (1758). Systema Naturae per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis (in Latin). Volume 1 (10th ed.). Holmiae:Laurentii Salvii. p. 153.
  6. Jobling, James A. (2010). The Helm Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names. London: Christopher Helm. p. 230. ISBN 978-1-4081-2501-4.
  7. Maley, J.M.; Brumfield, R.T. (2013). "Mitochondrial and next-generation sequence data used to infer phylogenetic relationships and species limits in the Clapper/King Rail complex". Condor. 115 (2): 316–329. doi:10.1525/cond.2013.110138.
  8. Gill, Frank; Donsker, David, eds. (2019). "Flufftails, finfoots, rails, trumpeters, cranes, limpkin". World Bird List Version 9.2. International Ornithologists' Union. Retrieved 18 July 2019.
  9. Maley, J.M.; McCormack, J.E.; Tsai, W.L.E.; Schwab, E.M.; Van Dort, J.; Juárez, R.C.; Carling, M.D. (2016). "Fonseca Mangrove Rail: a news subspecies from Honduras". Western Birds. 47 (4): 1–14.
  • Birds of Venezuela by Hilty, ISBN 0-7136-6418-5
  • ffrench, Richard (1991). A Guide to the Birds of Trinidad and Tobago (2nd ed.). Comstock Publishing. ISBN 0-8014-9792-2.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.