Mangrove rail
The mangrove rail 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.
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. 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. 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. The genus Rallus had been erected in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. The specific epithet longirostris combines the Latin longus meaning "long" and -rostris meaning "-billed".
The mangrove rail was formerly considered to be conspecific with the clapper rail. The two species were split based on the results of molecular phylogenetic study published in 2013.
Eight subspecies are recognised:
- R. l. phelpsi Wetmore, 1941 – northeast Colombia, northwest Venezuela
- R. l. dillonripleyi Phelps Jr & Aveledo, 1987 – northeast Venezuela
- R. l. margaritae Zimmer, JT & Phelps, 1944 – Margarita Island
- R. l. pelodramus Oberholser, 1937 – Trinidad
- R. l. longirostris Boddaert, 1783 – coast of the Guianas
- R. l. crassirostris Lawrence, 1871 – coast of Brazil
- R. l. cypereti Taczanowski, 1878 – coastal southwest Colombia to northwest Peru
- R. l. berryorum Maley et al., 2016 – coastal west Honduras, possibly to west Nicaragua and northwest Costa Rica
