The Lord Howe Woodhen, Gallirallus sylvestris, also known as the Lord Howe Island Woodhen or Lord Howe (Island) Rail, is a flightless bird

Bird

Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...

 of the rail

Rallidae

The rails, or Rallidae, are a large cosmopolitan family of small to medium-sized birds. The family exhibits considerable diversity and the family also includes the crakes, coots, and gallinules...

 family (Rallidae). It is endemic

Endemic (ecology)

Endemism is the ecological state of being unique to a defined geographic location, such as an island, nation or other defined zone, or habitat type; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsewhere. For example, all species of lemur are endemic to the...

 to Lord Howe Island

Lord Howe Island

Lord Howe Island is an irregularly crescent-shaped volcanic remnant in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, directly east of mainland Port Macquarie, and about from Norfolk Island. The island is about 11 km long and between 2.8 km and 0.6 km wide with an area of...

 off the Australian coast. It is a small olive brown bird, with a short tail and a downcurved bill. The Lord Howe Island Rail lives in sub-tropical forest

Forest

A forest, also referred to as a wood or the woods, is an area with a high density of trees. As with cities, depending where you are in the world, what is considered a forest may vary significantly in size and have various classification according to how and what of the forest is composed...

s, feeding on earthworm

Earthworm

Earthworm is the common name for the largest members of Oligochaeta in the phylum Annelida. In classical systems they were placed in the order Opisthopora, on the basis of the male pores opening posterior to the female pores, even though the internal male segments are anterior to the female...

s, crustacean

Crustacean

Crustaceans form a very large group of arthropods, usually treated as a subphylum, which includes such familiar animals as crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles. The 50,000 described species range in size from Stygotantulus stocki at , to the Japanese spider crab with a leg span...

s, fruit

Fruit

In broad terms, a fruit is a structure of a plant that contains its seeds.The term has different meanings dependent on context. In non-technical usage, such as food preparation, fruit normally means the fleshy seed-associated structures of certain plants that are sweet and edible in the raw state,...

, and taking the egg

Egg (biology)

An egg is an organic vessel in which an embryo first begins to develop. In most birds, reptiles, insects, molluscs, fish, and monotremes, an egg is the zygote, resulting from fertilization of the ovum, which is expelled from the body and permitted to develop outside the body until the developing...

s of shearwater

Shearwater

Shearwaters are medium-sized long-winged seabirds. There are more than 30 species of shearwaters, a few larger ones in the genus Calonectris and many smaller species in the genus Puffinus...

s and petrel

Petrel

Petrels are tube-nosed seabirds in the bird order Procellariiformes. The common name does not indicate relationship beyond that point, as "petrels" occur in three of the four families within that group...

s.

Woodhens mate for life and are usually encountered in pairs. They are territorial and will appear from the forest's understory to investigate the source of any unusual noise. A mated pair will defend an area of approximately 3 hectare

Hectare

The hectare is a metric unit of area defined as 10,000 square metres , and primarily used in the measurement of land. In 1795, when the metric system was introduced, the are was defined as being 100 square metres and the hectare was thus 100 ares or 1/100 km2...

s, with offspring being expelled from this area once grown. The population of birds is thus restricted by the amount of available territory.^{http://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/npws.nsf/Content/The+Lord+Howe+Island+woodhen}

Gilbert Rail

A rail

Rallidae

The rails, or Rallidae, are a large cosmopolitan family of small to medium-sized birds. The family exhibits considerable diversity and the family also includes the crakes, coots, and gallinules...

, known only from a single specimen in the form of an alcohol-preserved skin at Harvard, was originally believed to have been collected on one of the Gilbert Islands

Gilbert Islands

The Gilbert Islands are a chain of sixteen atolls and coral islands in the Pacific Ocean. They are the main part of Republic of Kiribati and include Tarawa, the site of the country's capital and residence of almost half of the population.-Geography:The atolls and islands of the Gilbert Islands...

 and named as the Gilbert Rail, Gallirallus conditicius (Peters & Griscom, 1928).

However, the island attributed to this holotype

Holotype

A holotype is a single physical example of an organism, known to have been used when the species was formally described. It is either the single such physical example or one of several such, but explicitly designated as the holotype...

 is low, rocky and sandy, and has no habitat suitable for a rail.

It now appears that a curatorial error led to the specimen being labeled to the wrong collection, and the specimen is actually an immature female Lord Howe Woodhen. It differs from that species only in a paler crown, throat and underparts, and browner head, but long immersion in alcohol could have changed the colour. (Taylor and van Perlo,Rails SBN 90-74345-20-4)

The island to which the specimen was originally attributed is 4,500 km from Lord Howe Island, and it appears improbable that two flightless rails could evolve separately with no morphological differences.

Decline and recovery

When explorers first discovered Lord Howe Island in 1788, they identified 15 bird species including the then common woodhen. Being flightless, curious, and having never been hunted, they became a readily available source of food for visiting sailors and the island's early human population. Since its discovery and the arrival of settlers on the island in 1834), nine of these 15 species became extinct. The woodhen declined in numbers until the late 1970s, when surveys showed that the population had dropped to less than 30 birds, confined to the difficult to access summit regions of the island's two mountains, Mount Gower

Mount Gower

Mount Gower dominates the southern tip of Lord Howe Island and has its peak at 875 metres .Average climbing time to Mount Gower's summit is 8 – 10 hours. The path is rope-assisted and rated as one of the world's best one-day hikes...

 and Mount Lidgbird

Mount Lidgbird

Mount Lidgbird is located in the southern section of Lord Howe Island, just north of Mount Gower, and has its peak at 777 metres ....

.^{http://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/npws.nsf/Content/The+Lord+Howe+Island+woodhen}

A comprehensive study was done to determine the cause of the decline, which was eventually attributed to the introduction of feral pig

Pig

A pig is any of the animals in the genus Sus, within the Suidae family of even-toed ungulates. Pigs include the domestic pig, its ancestor the wild boar, and several other wild relatives...

s. The elimination of the pigs and other disruptive animals (goats), plus a programme of ex-situ conservation

Ex-situ conservation

Ex-situ conservation means literally, "off-site conservation". It is the process of protecting an endangered species of plant or animal outside of its natural habitat; for example, by removing part of the population from a threatened habitat and placing it in a new location, which may be a wild...

 (captive breeding) which commenced in May 1980 (the first egg was laid in June 1980), allowed the Lord Howe Rail to recover its numbers. The captive breeding program was funded with $150,000 from the Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife

Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife

The Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife is an Australian not-for-profit, non-government organisation that was incorporated on 29 June 1970. Its purpose is to foster the protection of Australia's native plants, animals and cultural heritage through fundraising for environmental education and...

, which was spent to construct the compound and to employ scientists involved in this project.^{http://fnpw.org.au/plants-a-wildlife/birds/lord-howe-island-woodhen}

Today there are about 250 birds,^{http://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/npws.nsf/Content/The+Lord+Howe+Island+woodhen} which may be the optimal population size for the island.

The analysis of the threats to the Lord Howe Rail, and the solution, is considered a model for conservation biology

Conservation biology

Conservation biology is the scientific study of the nature and status of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction...

. A number of possible causes of the decline were on the island, from introduced rat

Rat

Rats are various medium-sized, long-tailed rodents of the superfamily Muroidea. "True rats" are members of the genus Rattus, the most important of which to humans are the black rat, Rattus rattus, and the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus...

s to Tasmanian Masked Owl

Tasmanian Masked Owl

The Tasmanian Masked Owl is a bird in the barn-owl family Tytonidae that is endemic to the island state of Tasmania, Australia. It is the largest subspecies of the Australian Masked Owl, the largest Tyto owl in the world, and is sometimes considered a full species...

s. However, only the elimination of the pigs would have saved the species from extinction

Extinction

In biology and ecology, extinction is the end of an organism or of a group of organisms , normally a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point...

, and identifying the cause and solution in a timely manner was crucial to the success of the programme.

Following success with the woodhen, there have been recovery efforts for other endemic species on Lord Howe Island, including the Lord Howe Flax Snail

Lord Howe Flax Snail

The Lord Howe Flax Snail or the Lord Howe placostylus, scientific name Placostylus bivaricosus, is a species of large air-breathing land snail, a terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusc in the family Placostylidae, according to the taxonomy of the Gastropoda .This large snail is found only on Lord...

 (Placostylus bivaricosus) and the Lord Howe Currawong

Lord Howe Currawong

The Lord Howe Currawong , Lord Howe Island Currawong or Lord Howe Pied Currawong, is a large and mainly black passerine bird in the Artamidae family...

 (Strepera graculina crissalis).

External links

• BirdLife Species Factsheet.
• About the Lord Howe Island Woodhen (National Parks & Wildlife Service
  National Parks and Wildlife Service (New South Wales)
  The National Parks and Wildlife Service is part of the Office of Environment and Heritage - the main government conservation agency in New South Wales, Australia....
  
   NSW
  New South Wales
  New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
  
   website)
• Image of an egg of a Lord Howe Island Woodhen (Australian Museum
  Australian Museum
  The Australian Museum is the oldest museum in Australia, with an international reputation in the fields of natural history and anthropology. It features collections of vertebrate and invertebrate zoology, as well as mineralogy, palaeontology, and anthropology...
  
  website)