Summer 2009
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King rail
Searching for king rails is like looking for that needle in a haystack: the few remaining crow-sized birds are so well hidden in the marshes of southwestern Ontario, they are nearly impossible to detect
by Tim Tiner
Lurking deep within the most inaccessible marshlands in southern Ontario, the king rail is a secretive, solitary wading bird that blends into its densely vegetated surroundings. Seldom flying, flushing or swimming in open water, the mottled, rusty-hued, crow-sized bird is so reclusive that it was not even recorded in the annals of ornithology until John James Audubon noted it in 1835. Almost two centuries later, the bird remains a mystery, holding out in Canada largely in a few refuges in the most intensely farmed area of the province.
King rails primarily inhabit coastal marshes. Inland, they used to be concentrated around the wetlands of Lake St. Clair and the Ohio side of Lake Erie, as well as in the lower Mississippi area. It is believed that they were once more common in large marshes along this province’s Lake Erie and Lake Ontario shores. Today, however, more than 80 percent of southwestern Ontario’s original wetlands are gone. Only about a tenth of the once vast marshes in the Lake St. Clair area remains.
Scientific Name: Rallus elegans (from Latin, meaning elegant rail)
Length: 38–48 cm
Weight: 300–360 grams
Wingspan: 53–63 cm
Average clutch: 8–11 eggs
Incubation period: 21–23 days
Fledging age: 9–10 weeks
Food: Mainly crayfish and aquatic insects; also small fish, frogs, clams, grasshoppers, crickets and plant seeds
Predators: Foxes, raccoons, mink, coyotes, feral cats, crows, great horned owls and northern harriers
To hear the king rails’s call, visit Environment Canada’s Wildspace website: www.wildspace.ec.gc.ca/media/sounds/kira.wav
In 1985, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) estimated that Ontario had only enough suitable habitat left to support fewer than 300 pairs of king rails, and listed the bird as a species of special concern. By the early 1990s, fieldwork for the province’s first breeding bird atlas and the Rare Breeding Bird Program suggested that the actual provincial population of this species was between 20 and 52 pairs. In response, COSEWIC changed its status to endangered in April 1994.
Severe declines in the population have occurred elsewhere, too. The king rail has been declared endangered in most of the lower Great Lakes states, where only a small number still appear to nest. Outside of Florida and Louisiana, the bird is considered at least threatened.
The habitat requirements of the king rail are far more specific than those of the much more common and considerably smaller Virginia rail, says Jon McCracken, national programs director with Bird Studies Canada and a member to the National King Rail Recovery Team, formed in 1997. “King rails have a whole range of habitat needs that extend beyond the nesting period,” he notes. The plump, somewhat chicken-like birds require highly diverse environments, with grasses, sedges, cattails and other aquatic plants, shallow open water, exposed mud and drier shrubby or grassy hummocks. These rails build their nests on marshbound tussocks of grass just above the water, hiding the nests so well under canopies of bent stalks that none have been found in Ontario since the 1970s. After the large broods of downy black chicks hatch in early summer, their parents lead them to drier areas, such as shrubby swales.
Because rails are so difficult to spot, most records are of males calling as they stake out breeding territories after returning from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts in the U.S. around late April and early May. Typically in the early morning and evening, they utter a rapid series of harsh, resonant “kik-kik-kik” notes, rolling the last syllable.
The last province-wide surveys found 32 calling males in 1997 and 27 in 1999. More than half were detected on the Walpole Island First Nation, where a delta at the mouth of the St. Clair River forms nearly 80 square kilometres of marshes. Walpole Island’s mix of marshland grading into wet tallgrass prairie offers the ideal range of habitat for rails, as well as more than 50 other COSEWIC-designated species at risk. Smaller numbers of rails live in several other marshes along eastern Lake St. Clair, together covering almost 30 square kilometres. A few of these rails turn up elsewhere, mainly at large wetlands around Point Pelee, Long Point, Rondeau Provincial Park and Prince Edward County.
While rail numbers appear to have remained relatively stable in the past decade, McCracken says a further decline could go undetected. “It’s really difficult to provide a good estimate on what the population is doing in a given year,” he explains. “They’re a hard bird to study.”
“There are a lot of unanswered questions about their life system needs,” concurs P. Allen Woodliffe, another member of the recovery team, who is the Aylmer district ecologist for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. “We have to use the best science to identify the habitat that needs to be protected.”
Earlier this decade, Woodliffe and his recovery-team colleagues completed a draft strategy proposing such research. Three years after the draft was due to be made public, however, it is still undergoing review. Barbara Slezak, a senior species-at-risk biologist at Environment Canada, the lead agency in developing the strategy, says that normally the process “can last from a few months to up to a year.”
Though wetland loss has slowed in southern Ontario, even large marshes used by rails may be affected by invasive species, such as choking monocultures of non-native phragmites and hybrid cattails. Pesticide and fertilizer runoff and other disturbances from encroaching development are also a concern. The largest concentration of rails, at Walpole Island and Lake St. Clair, is just downstream from Sarnia’s sprawling petrochemical plants.
The king rail’s food supply may also be threatened, notes McCracken, referring to reports that crayfish, the top food item for this bird, are now much less common in some areas than in the past. According to McCracken, research has shown that acid precipitation causes a decrease in calcium in aquatic habitats, which may affect crayfish.
Even though most of the known Ontario king rail population nests in parks, national wildlife areas and other wetlands protected from outright destruction, the survival of this species depends on safeguarding it south of the border. “The population in southern Ontario is on the extreme northern edge of its range, so we may never have had 200 pairs here,” says Dan Lebedyk, a conservation biologist with the Essex Region Conservation Authority. His organization manages Hillman Marsh, at the base of Point Pelee, where a male rail is detected about once every other year.
“The question is,” adds Lebedyk, “why is the local population not large and increasing? There really is no clear answer, other than that the population may always have been low.” McCracken agrees. The king rail in Ontario, he says, “is never going to get back into big numbers.”
Tim Tiner is the author of several nature guidebooks and a long-time contributor to ON Nature.
My Turn
Nidhi Tandon
As told to Jim MacInnis
I had the privilege of growing up in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and Zimbabwe. These are huge countries with incredibly diverse ecosystems: river ways, deserts, savannah, forest, mountains and oceans. My formative years were in Tanzania, a rural country where President Julius Nyerere (fondly referred to as “Mwalimu,” which means “teacher”) encouraged the kind of small-plot subsistence farming that forms the backbone of most sustainable economies. All our schools devoted a good chunk of time to tilling our small school plots, planting sweet potato, beans, tomatoes, maize and kale. My greatest satisfaction then was to have a hand wrapped around the jembe (hoe) and my toes in the sun-warmed soils. Read the full article…
Did you know?
- In one year, Vancouver’s Lions Gate Hospital produced waste that included 1,767,900 pairs of gloves – nearly eight tonnes of latex and 21 tonnes of plastics – and 58 tonnes of disposable diapers and pads. Read the full article…
Waterworld
by Sharon Oosthoek
Answer: Brilliant purple mats of cyanobacteria and translucent ponytailshaped microbes. Question: What lives in the recently discovered sinkholes at the bottom of Lake Huron?
The sinkholes, probably the remains of what once held some of the earth’s ancient seas, appear to contain an ecosystem that is at odds with the rest of the lake, according to Bopaiah Biddanda, an aquatic ecologist at Michigan’s Grand Valley State University and a leader of its team of scientists studying the sinkholes. Read the full article…
New atlas project
by Joe Crowley
Threatened by habitat loss, urban sprawl and busy roads, Ontario’s reptile species are becoming disturbingly scarce (see “The way of the lizard,” Winter 2008/09). Moreover, the populations that remain can be extremely difficult to locate. During Ontario Nature’s Reptiles at Risk project, which was launched last year and focuses on the organization’s nature reserves in Grey and Bruce counties, several new populations of rare reptiles were discovered. This suggests that the whereabouts of many populations of reptiles have yet to be documented. “It’s critical that we find out where our reptile populations live,” says Mark Carabetta, conservation science manager for Ontario Nature. “If we don’t have that information, it is very difficult to identify potential threats, assess local status and abundance, and promote habitat protection and stewardship.” Read the full article…
Greenbelt of the future
by Amber Cowie
Ontario Nature and the other member groups that together form the Greenbelt Alliance celebrated the fourth anniversary of Ontario’s Greenbelt with a collective eye to future conservation efforts. Buoyed by the success of the Greenbelt, the alliance proposes expanding this protected landscape by 60 percent, the equivalent of 485,000 hectares. Read the full article…
Critical list
by Anne Bell
Every year the Species at Risk in Ontario (SARO) list grows longer. In February, the Committee on the Status of Species at Risk in Ontario added four new species to the provincial list: eastern flowering dogwood, Ogden’s pondweed, eastern pondmussel and a subspecies of the red knot. While the causes of decline are complex in most cases, invasive exotic species and habitat degradation are the primary ones. Read the full article…
Frequent fliers
by Jim MacInnis
“One of the big questions in songbird conservation is the role of breeding versus wintering grounds in driving widespread songbird declines,” observes Bridget Stutchbury, a biology professor at York University and the author of Silence of the Songbirds. “Though we are fairly sure of the wintering range of a species as a whole, we have never been able to link individual breeding and wintering populations.” Read the full article…
Gimme shelter
by Jim MacInnis
In 2006, scientists in New York state started noticing something odd about the bats where they were conducting research: a strange discoloration around the animals’ snouts. Two years later, similar descriptions were noted in seven other states, with the additional observation that the affected bats were also extremely thin. Conservation agencies began to advise people to stay out of local caves. Dubbed “white nose syndrome,” the discoloration is probably a symptom of a fungus infection, produced by the cold-loving Geomyces genus commonly found in caves. When this fungus afflicts bats, their hibernation is interrupted for reasons so far unknown. In their struggle to stay warm in the dead of winter, the animals use up much-needed calories and eventually starve to death. Read the full article…
Natural connections
By Caroline Schultz
When in downtown Toronto, Ottawa or London, it’s sometimes hard to imagine that we were at one time a predominantly rural society.
At the turn of the 20th century, fewer than half of Ontario’s population lived in towns and cities. But by the 1940s more than 60 percent were urban dwellers. Today more than 85 percent of the province’s 12 million people live in urban areas, almost two-thirds of them in the Greater Golden Horseshoe.
The first generations of city dwellers had roots in the rural landscape. Now we are raising children several generations removed from the land or who are new Ontarians with little or no connection to the countryside beyond our urban boundaries. But, as we’ve migrated into the cities, have we left nature behind? As Edward Keenan describes in his article “Wild for the city” on page 28, our towns and cities aren’t all asphalt and concrete jungles. They can harbour an astonishing array of wildlife. Despite the inevitable conflicts and challenges the interface sometimes poses for humans and animals alike, nature in the city can have huge benefits for people.
But greater forces are keeping our relationship with nature at bay. As cities grow and suburbs sprawl, we spend more time commuting. We rely on television for escape and entertainment. The advent of the Internet has made us a wired society spending large chunks of time seeking information and amusement in electronic form.
Kids today are more likely to be able to distinguish between video game modules than to be able to tell an oak tree from a maple. And that means that there is a big hole in our children’s lives.
This isn’t an exclusively urban phenomenon. Having lived for almost 20 years in small Ontario towns with woods, wetlands and ponds on the doorstep, I’ve seen as much disconnection from nature there as I have among city kids. But children have a natural affinity for nature. Take any child out to visit a frog pond or to lift up rocks to spot salamanders and the enthusiasm and delight is universal.
Lack of exposure to nature has been shown to lead to attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses in children. Author Richard Louv has coined the term “nature deficit disorder” to describe what happens to kids who rarely get outside or who rarely roam far from asphalt. It’s simple, Louv says: “If we want healthy well-rounded kids, we need to make sure they spend time outdoors in natural settings where they are free to imagine, problem-solve, discover and dream.”
Ontario Nature couldn’t agree more, and that is why we are proud to announce our new From the Ground Up program. From the Ground Up will hook kids back into nature by offering outdoor recreation and hands-on conservation experiences, as well as volunteering and leadership opportunities. And what a wealth of hands-on nature experiences our cities and towns can offer!
Caroline Schultz is the executive director of Ontario Nature.
Contributors
“I love shooting for ON Nature,” says photographer William Ciccocioppo, “it’s like getting free science lessons.” Ciccocioppo’s latest assignment (“Wild for the city,” page 28) took him to the Brick Works in Toronto where he learned the green future of an abandoned industrial site. The site’s bleak state didn’t put him off: “There is a lot of beauty in nature even when it is seemingly brown and grey. It seems quieter and more unassuming.”
As Ontario Nature’s Greenway conservation coordinator, Amber Cowie works closely with farmers, private landowners and community groups to expand and protect Ontario’s green cores and corridors (“Blueprint for a Greenway,” page 35). “For me, true environmentalism means bringing together everyone who respects and cares for their earth and never drawing arbitrary lines around who qualifies for the role.”
Message Board
Spring reflections
I really enjoyed the spring 2009 issue, particularly the articles in the “Birds of the Boreal” section. I recently finished The Diversity of Life, by Edward O. Wilson, and after reading the article on songbirds I realized how small the world is and how everything is so interconnected. Our birds need habitat in both Canada and Latin America – both in the north and the south.
I also found the information in Earth Watch about the Internet interesting. I don’t have a computer and rely instead on magazines to keep me informed. However, I didn’t know that the machines that run the Internet required so much energy. So now I’m glad I don’t own a computer.
Jim MacInnis’s “Recycling waste” also caught my attention. The piece ends with the comment that ultimately the business of recycling depends on the consumer to buy products manufactured from recycled goods. I always buy recycled toilet paper but what other recycled goods are there to buy and how do you know whether you’re buying recycled goods or not? And where can I get shadegrown coffee to buy? Maybe you could provide some information in future issues.
Angela Chang-Alloy,
Brampton
Quiet dawdling
With regard to David Lees’s “A fish in the city” [Spring 2009], more needs to be done to deal with the unsustainable practices of our modern cash crop and livestock factory farms before all our waters are polluted and every last wetland, woodlot, fenceline, pollinator, swallow and fish is eliminated from the rural scene. It is time to stop tiptoeing around lest we offend a farmer – the steward of the land, the producer of our food. It is time for Ontario Nature and other nature groups to lobby the provincial and federal governments to regulate factory farms as industrial entities; to curb the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics; to mandate the planting of natural buffer strips along all waterways; to mandate the creation of mini-wetlands on farms so that all surface runoff and field drainage is filtered and treated before it enters public streams; and to target research funding for sustainable and clean technologies in agriculture. It is time to implement best farm practices rather than print more glossy brochures about best farm practices.
Klaus Keunecke,
Grand Bend
Dead calm
Beneath their shimmering surfaces, environmental injuries take a toll on the health of our great lakes
by Peter Christie
On a windless early morning, Lake Ontario reflects the sun in a jewelled sheen. Gulls wheel overhead.
Ripples lap limestone. The seemingly perfect calm masks a problem.
Lake Ontario and the other Great Lakes do not look sick, but they are. Areas of the world’s largest body of fresh water have reached what scientists recently called a “tipping point” – the place where new environmental insults risk throwing the natural balance permanently out of whack.
Lake watchers are awaiting the re-energized return of a proven hero – the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. Until problems become more visible, however, governments have shown little will to overhaul and invigorate the Canada-U.S. accord that was once a model of international environmental cooperation.
Almost two years have passed since the Canada-U.S. Binational Executive Committee submitted an 18-month review of the agreement to federal officials on both sides of the border. The review – incorporating opinions from more than 350 experts and others – says that updating the 37-year-old accord and renewing the commitment to make it work are essential.
So far, the response to the review has been near silence.
Things were different in the beginning. Through the 1960s, the lower lakes became so ill that they were often literally green. Choking blooms of lime-coloured algae girdled beaches. Oxygen-starved fish rotted on shores. In 1969, the Lake Erie mouth of the Cuyahoga River – sludge-thick with pollution – burst spectacularly into flames.
When the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement was created in 1972, everyone recognized its importance. The bilateral blueprint detailed an unprecedented research and cleanup partnership. Researchers (my late father, fisheries scientist Jack Christie, was among them) recognized that the ecological health of wildlife, from fish to bugs to birds, was tied to the chemical balance of the water. The agreement included this “ecosystem approach” – putting the big picture first.
Phosphorus from detergents – acting on algae like fertilizer – was identified as a major problem in the lakes. Efforts under the agreement led to new sewage treatment plants and a ban on high-phosphate soaps. The situation began to improve. Lake whitefish and cormorants battled back. Beaches became mostly free of dead fish and peasoup-green water. Bald eagles returned to nest in shoreline pines.
“There is no question the agreement has had a lot of successes,” reflects John Jackson of the environmental coalition Great Lakes United. “But the job is far from done.”
Many agree that the accord has been losing steam – and relevance – since the 1980s. It was amended in 1978, 1983 and 1987 but not since then.
Old problems (pesticide runoff, PCBs, mercury) persist. Eating a lot of lake fish is still hazardous. And, after more than 20 years, only three of 43 toxic hot spots – areas targeted by the agreement for cleanup – have been delisted. In Ohio, where the Ottawa River meets Lake Erie, warnings remain against even wading in the water.
Meanwhile, threats have multiplied. New toxins – flame retardants and drug compounds – have been added to the soup. Severe climate-change-related storms overwhelm city sewage controls. Nutrient overloading is back, and so are algal blooms.
About a third of the 180 invasive creatures and plants in the lakes appeared after the agreement was in place; the problems they bring are complex.
Invading mussels, for example, cycle botulism up the food chain. As a result, water-birds have died by the thousands, and the risks to people are dire.
The importance of the lakes has not diminished. Forty million people live in the region, and some say that the economy of the Great Lakes basin is the world’s second largest. One-fifth of the earth’s fresh water is here, and the significance of its natural history is immeasurable.
In March, environmentalists applauded a unilateral U.S. announcement of $475 million in funding for Great Lakes restoration. That same month, Ontario called for public input on its own vision document for the lakes. But binational cooperation is badly needed to address the crisis in the Great Lakes. The shimmering, impassive surface of the lakes hides deeper trouble, and only a renewed, revitalized Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement can get to the bottom of it.
Peter Christie is a science writer based in Kingston. Jack Christie retired as Ontario’s coordinator of Great Lakes fisheries research a few years before his death in 1997.
In House
Our donors
Boreal bird fundraiser
Coinciding with spring migration, Ontario Nature hosted its first Green Tea fundraiser in March to benefit boreal songbirds and protection of the boreal forest. More than 140 people showed up to support our campaigns for better habitat protection.
Bridget Stutchbury, a York University professor renowned for her research into the lives of migratory bird species, and the event’s keynote speaker, delivered a fascinating presentation on boreal songbirds that depend on this critical habitat for nesting and breeding. She revealed recent discoveries about the phenomenon of bird migration and captivated the audience with astonishing radar images of birds descending into Toronto’s ravines, parks and backyards to rest before their final spring push north to the boreal region.
Minister of Natural Resources Donna Cansfield also attended the event and spoke of the importance of working with conservation organizations and industry to protect this important area. She took the opportunity to reaffirm the provincial government’s promise to protect at least 50 percent of the northern boreal region.
The Green Tea event raised more than $14,000 in support of Ontario Nature’s campaigns for the habitat and wildlife of the boreal forest.
The fundraiser was made possible through the generous support of event sponsors Isabel Bassett, former Ontario cabinet minister and former chair of TVO, and Rosemary Speirs, past president of Ontario Nature’s board of directors.
For more information about our campaigns for the boreal forest, visit www.ontarionature.org.
Our clubs
Mississippi Valley Field Naturalists
The lush Mississippi River valley is home to a member group fortunate enough to have a relatively pristine river valley as its namesake. The Mississippi Valley Field Naturalists (MVFN) club, made up of nearly 200 members from Lanark Highlands, Carleton Place, Mississippi Mills and environs, recently celebrated its 20-year anniversary as a member group of Ontario Nature.
For two decades, MVFN has raised public awareness of and appreciation for the native wildlife of the Mississippi River watershed. The group offers nature walks, birding events and a summer-long canoeing program to explore nature around the water’s edge. Canoe season officially begins with the annual spring nature paddle at the end of June and culminates with a second canoe trip in September in Algonquin Provincial Park. MVFN’s outdoor program went international earlier this year with a trip to a monarch butterfly sanctuary in Mexico. Bolstered by the success of that excursion, the group is now planning a 10-day birding trip to Cuba.
MVFN also plays an active role in addressing environmental concerns at the municipal level. The group has provided input into cutting-edge environmental policies for the Town of Mississippi Mills Community Official Plan, adopted in 2005, and helped form three municipal environmental advisory committees.
In 2006, MVFN members paddled the entire Mississippi watershed, from Lake Mazinaw to the Ottawa River, measuring water temperatures along the way as a first step in a long-term assessment of the impact of global warming on waterways.
MVFN’s flagship Environmental Education Program is intended to supplement environmental education in schools. Five years of fundraising yielded more than $25,000 to support hands-on stewardship experiences for young people. In May, with funding from the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, an educational program teaching grade 8 students about protecting sources of drinking water will begin.
This active organization also offers the Cliff Bennett Nature Bursary. The bursary, established by friends and family of the local naturalist and artist on the occasion of his 75th birthday, is awarded to a local high school graduate who is pursuing post-secondary education in environmental studies. Bennett continues to be an enthusiastic member of MVFN and leads many of the group’s popular birding outings.
In 1988, MVFN’s founding president Ken Bennett explained the title of the organization’s newsletter, the Whippoor-will: “This bird is a reminder of something we have lost. Yet, unlike some other losses of our natural heritage, this one may not be forever. One day, perhaps, the whip-poor-will may again become a common sight in Lanark County.”
To learn more about MVFN events and projects, visit www.mvfn.ca.
Muddy waters
Aquaculture has been charged with multiple crimes against the environment. But today fish farms must abide by stringent regulations while many wild fish populations are being decimated. Can we learn to live with this industry?
By Douglas Hunter
It is harvest day at Depot Harbour on the north shore of Parry Island. The mid-March sky over eastern Georgian Bay is bright, but the temperature is below freezing as farmhands gather on a floating dock at Aqua-Cage Fisheries. The water, which mechanical agitators prevent from icing over, is streaked with iridescent flashes. An Archimedes screw inside a plastic tube gently slurps up one-kilo rainbow trout from a seine-net cage, one of an array lining the shore, and deposits them in a waist-high plastic shipping container called a tote that can hold 400 kilograms of fish. Read the full article…
Wild for the city
Urban ecologists offer a new take on city planning, arguing that balancing biodiversity with development is key to healthy urban centres
By Edward Keenan
Neville Park Boulevard is a two-block-long cul-de-sac in east-end Toronto where, during normal times, one of the hotter topics of conversation is whether to call the neighbourhood “The Beach” or “The Beaches.” Running along the bottom of a wooded ravine, the street begins at a public staircase that leads down to a sandy beach on Lake Ontario and ambles north about 500 metres to a dead-end roundabout. The homes of some residents – many of them dog owners – back onto sloping yards densely forested with towering maples. This idyllic street, which might have been designed on a Hollywood backlot, was the setting for a real-life drama that unfolded earlier this year, a tale that, as the Toronto Star put it, “highlights the sometimes uneasy coexistence between humans and animals in an urban setting.” Read the full article…
Places to grow
Rain gardens soak up stormwater, reduce runoff and are a magnet for wildlife. Bonus: they’re practically maintenance free
By Conor Mihell Read the full article…
Wolfsong
Lonesome or aggressive, mournful or spirited, few sounds in nature thrill and mystify like the nocturnal dirge of this top predator. A listener’s guide to the meaning of wolf howls
By Ray Ford
“It’s a little early for this. My voice isn’t warmed up,” Rick Stronks says apologetically. Then Algonquin Provincial Park’s chief naturalist draws a deep breath, rounds his lips into an oval and tilts his head back.
A long, mournful wail soars over the bog behind the park’s visitor centre, rising over the Jack pines and squawking jays, and dissipating on the wind. When the song fades, Stronks pauses, waiting for the park wolves to respond. But there is only silence. On this sunny, late-March morning, most wolves are pairing up. Read the full article…
Spring 2009
