Field Notes: The Crucible on Laysan Island

While I’m researching my free bi-weekly articles, I find a lot of great tidbits, tangents, and delightful but not-quite-on-topic quotes that don’t make it to print. I offer Field Notes as a dispatch to paid subscribers that includes clippings from primary sources, stand-alone quotes, and snippets that got cut for time. This issue of Field Notes covers material that didn’t make it into last week’s post on Laysan Island.

The most delightful, and consequently tragic, thing that I learned while researching last week’s piece was about the existence of a tiny, flightless, and mischievous bird called the Laysan Rail. Naturalists apparently liked comparing the birds to marbles. One described a Laysan Rail chick as "a black velvet marble rolling along the ground. Its little feet and legs are so small and move so fast that they can hardly be seen." Another said their calls sounded like “a handful or two of marbles being thrown on a glass roof and then descending in a succession of bounds."

These birds existed only on this one mile-square island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and went extinct after Max Schlemmer introduced rabbits, which completely stripped the island of vegetation. Before they disappeared, naturalists who visited the island in the 1890s and early 1900s left some delightful accounts.

The birds got a lot of their nourishment from the eggs of seabirds that nested on the island, and it apparently took a lot of work for these tiny, persistent birds to break the shell. Here’s a description left by Henry Palmer from 1892:

If they could get away with it, they’d let Laysan Finches do the hard work before driving them away “with a great show of fuss and feathers” and enjoying the egg themselves. Here’s another passage, from William Bryan in 1915:

Finally, here’s a ghostly video of a rail bounding across the sand, filmed while the goofy birds still graced this earth. The video was taken in 1923, the same year that the rails disappeared from Laysan.

Laysan Finches, who are fortunately still with us, are nearly as charismatic and also deserve a shout-out. Here’s what Homer Dill had to say about them in 1911: