This furtive bird shows no mercy
The terrifying wails of a water rail may well have spawned the legend of the dreaded Banshee.
As anyone who has heard its petrifying screams in the darkest, dankest reaches of a swamp will tell you, they sound like a supernatural entity.
Time and again I’ve felt the marrow chill as these furtive birds shatter the peace of a marshland dawn with eerie screeches that ornithologists have dubbed “sharming”.
And there’s nothing charming about sharming. For me, water rails sound like something homicidal summoned from the netherworld.
Water rails certainly deserve a murderous reputation. For a creature weighing little more than a blackbird, the water rail is an efficient and merciless killer.
One look at the sabre-like beak leaves no doubt of how it can be used to dispatch any luckless small mammal or bird trespassing into the rail’s squelchy realm.
Browsing through the archives of British Birds journal reveals how rails, plumaged in streaky shades of brown and gunmetal blue, feed largely on aquatic invertebrates and plants. Yet they have few qualms about dispatching interlopers on their territory too.
One account from the late 1950s describes how a rail at Falsterbo, Sweden, dashed from reeds and began pecking a little stint before trampling it to death in the mud. The following day the rail killed a 13-inch eel.
The coming weeks will see an influx of water rails from Scandinavia and the near continent, bringing their haunting cries to the UK in time for Halloween.
The numbers of migrant birds arriving to escape the northern winter can be hard to determine, as the birds’ secretive behaviour has made assessing our breeding population difficult. However fears of a conservation crisis have been allayed recently with estimates of nearly 4000 pairs.