Most rails are elusive, rarely encountered sleuths of tall vegetation in marshes, swamps and coastal estuaries. As a birder, they are hard to find; as a birding photographer, they are nearly impossible to find. So it went for a few decades, until one of my favorite photo locations in coastal California became something of a hotspot for finding and photographing rails. It was quite a thrill for me to see and photograph the first one in close quarters, and that excitement hasn’t subsided.
Suddenly, the endangered Light-footed Clapper Rails became pretty common photo prizes along the boardwalk at Bolsa Chica Wetlands on the north edge of Huntington Beach, California. In the meantime, ornithologists even changed the species’ name to Ridgway’s Rails, making them even more impressive in my mind – after all, they were elevated from a subspecies to a full species!
Photographing Ridgway’s Rails is interesting, and often exciting. At least at Bolsa Chica, the rails are not very shy or concerned by passing people; they appear to be singularly keen on searching for, catching, and eating small crabs. But that means the rails rarely, if ever, stopped for me to photograph them. I mostly needed to keep up with an individual’s movements in and out of vegetation, in and out of light, plying the water’s edge and wading through vegetated shallows, all while trying to keep low – closer to the rail’s level – while trying to get sharp photos as the stealthy rail continued searching for crabs.
It’s always fun to get to know a new species, and to photograph individuals at the same time. It’s not the first species I would normally be attracted to in a location loaded with ducks, egrets, herons, terns, skimmers, gulls, pelicans, sandpipers, plovers, some raptors and a few passerines – but they were new, and elusive, and interesting, so how could I resist.
Article and photographs by Paul Konrad
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