Natural History Wanderings

On August I wrote about Clapper Rails Are Now Ridgway’s Rail | Natural History Wanderings. I recently saw several Ridgway’s Rails at high tide which I mentioned in a post A Relatively Big Day With Photos | Natural History Wanderings.

Ridgeway’s Rail by Sandy Steinman

I decided to do a little research on Ridgway’s Rail and here is what I found out about the bird and Robert Ridgway for whom the bird is named.

Ridgway’s Rail (Rallus obsoletus) is an endangeredspecies of bird. It is found principally in California‘s San Francisco Bay to southern Baja California. A member of the rail family, Rallidae, it is a chicken-sized bird that rarely flies.

This species is closely related to the clapper rail, and until recently was considered a subspecies.^[1] It has a long, downward curving bill and is grayish brown with a pale chestnut breast and conspicuous whitish rump patch. The population levels of Ridgway’s rail are precariously low due to destruction of its coastal and estuarine marshland habitat by prior land development and shoreline fill.

Read more at Ridgway’s rail – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Ridgway’s Rail is named after Robert Ridgway. Wikipedia tells us

Robert Ridgway (July 2, 1850 – March 25, 1929) was an American ornithologist specializing in systematics. He was appointed in 1880 by Spencer Fullerton Baird, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, to be the first full-time curator of birds at the United States National Museum, a title which he held until his death. In 1883, he helped found the American Ornithologists’ Union, where he served as officer and journal editor. Ridgway was an outstanding descriptive taxonomist, capping his life work with The Birds of North and Middle America (eight volumes, 1901–1919). In his lifetime, he was unmatched in the number of North American bird species that he described for science. As technical illustrator, Ridgway used his own paintings and outline drawings to complement his writing. He also published two books that systematized color names for describing birds, A Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists (1886) and Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (1912). Ornithologists all over the world continue to cite Ridgway’s color studies and books.

Other birds named for Ridgway include the buff-collared nightjar, Caprimulgus ridgwayi (once known as Ridgway’s whip-poor-will);[100] the turquoise cotinga, Cotinga ridgwayi; the Caribbean subspecies of the osprey, Pandion haliaetus ridgwayi; a Big Island subspecies of the ʻelepaio, Chasiempis sandwichensis ridgwayi; Ridgway’s hawk, Buteo ridgwayi; and many other species and subspecies.[101] The monotypic genus Ridgwayia is named for him; it consists of Aztec thrush, R. pinicola.[102]

Read more about him at Robert Ridgway – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.