The water rail

“We were astounded that such a small bird could make more noise than a pig and examined it in wonder before setting it free”


Country Sights and Sounds
John Shelley

I snuffled and wheezed my way to the lake an looked out across the cold, grey water, to where rafts of tufted and goldeneye duck drifted with apparent nonchalance over a chopping wave. A hundred yards away, the squeal of a water rail bit through the noise of the wind. It sounds more animal than bird; a painful protestation that is, to the rail, mere social chat.
I heard my first one as a youth in the hills of Devonshire, where the water rail was a scarce bird. Night after night it shrieked and wailed, until we hunted it down in a dense bank of reeds. We were astounded that such a small bird could make more noise than a pig and examined it in wonder before setting it free. It fled in a panic, and we neither saw nor heard it again.
Here, we have them in constant attendance; sometimes we wake to the sound of the shrieks, squeals and wailing cries that make up the rail’s vocabulary. Summer evenings are the best, when moorhen and coot, along with many other water birds, add their voices to make a tuneless yet strangely musical din.
Now, in winter, the water rail often talks to himself. The ducks are mostly silent. The mallard drakes have irregular outbursts among themselves when one tries to steal the wife of another. They have been paired for some weeks, but as the number of males is always greater than the number of females, competition for mates continues.
The drakes battle furiously, though always in short spells. There seems no order to the fighting, but first one fights with another, then with a third; two others join the bout while the first two attack onlookers, for no other reason than that they are there. As they all look the same, I think they do not know who they are fighting, nor half the time why. Their dedication to the task is admirable, even if their ways are unseemly.
The last few years have seen the mallard population decimated, with ducklings falling prey to an expanding mink population, so it is good to see this partial recovery in numbers. How long or to what extent this will continue remains to be seen. That mink are still around there is no doubt. We smell them in the woods; a rank, clinging stench at a gap in the wall or at the confluence where waters meet. Determined efforts to trap them have met with some success, but those remaining at large are easily able to reproduce fast enough to keep their own population intact.
The mink was blamed for the scarcity of otters, but a better understanding has shown that the two species can live together and share the same territories. Certainly there are plenty of fish and eels to sustain them both, though the mink’s taste for blood means it will target waterfowl if they are available.
We have otters here only intermittently. They seem to be itinerant by nature, with extensive territories, so that we see or, more likely, hear one of these fascinating animals only occasionally. A mother otter brought her small family to our corner of the lake last summer and kept them there for ten days or so before moving elsewhere. We didn’t see them, but we heard the family group each evening as they splashed about in the shallows, whistling to each other in that charming way that they have.
Exploration during the day showed us plenty of spraint, as the droppings of otters are known. These differ from the droppings of other animals, both in content and in smell. Where otters have been eating a lot of freshwater crayfish, the remains of these can be clearly seen in the light-coloured spraint; otherwise, there will be plenty of fish bones and scales. Mink also eat crayfish, but their own droppings are invariably black, or certainly close to it, and foul smelling. Otter spraint, on the other hand, has an almost pleasant fishy odour.
I don’t make a habit of sniffing dung, by the way – but a cursory examination of same can help us work out which animals we might expect to encounter. It might also be just what is needed to clear this rotten head cold.