By
Tristan Baurick | Posted February 13, 2019 at 06:00 AM | Updated February 13,
2019 at 02:46 PM
CAMERON
PARISH – On a late-winter night, a small group of mosquito-bitten
scientists and college students drag paint cans full of BBs and bolts through a
remote marsh south of Lake Charles. With spotlights and fishing nets at the
ready, they take high steps over tangles of long grass, hoping the clattering
will flush out their quarry—a red-eyed, sparrow-sized bird that few people have
ever seen.
Three
hours into the march, as expectations fade and leg muscles start to quake,
someone yells the two words the surveyors have been waiting to hear.
“Black
rail!”
Jonathon
Lueck, a bearded graduate student in a raccoon-skin cap, drops the dragline of
cans and races after the bird. It flies a few yards, then falls back to the
safety of the grass, where it lives in an underworld of tunnels and hideouts.
Lueck swings his net and misses. He tries cupping his hands over the wily rail,
but it slips from his fingers. Erik Johnson, Audubon Louisiana’s director of
bird conservation, catches up and drops his net in the nick of time.
“Wooo,”
Johnson yells. He scoops up the rail and holds it gently for all to see its
dappled, gunmetal-gray feathers. “The bird that doesn’t exist.”
‘In
desperate straits’
For most
ornithologists and birders, black rails are near-mythical creatures. They’re
shy around people, tend to come out only at night, and rarely fly. They also
live deep within remote wetlands around North America, making it tough for
researchers to gain more than a basic grasp on the species. But that’s starting
to change along the Gulf Coast, where Johnson and Audubon Louisiana are
collecting one of the continent’s richest pools of data on the elusive
bird.
