The Light-footed Clapper Rail (Rallus longirostris levipes) is a habitat specialist.  It only lives in wetlands along the coast of southern CA and northern Baja CA, Mexico.  These wetlands have always been rare because they only grow where really flat land meets the ocean which does not happen at many places from Santa Barbara County south.  In California there are about 30 coastal wetlands from Goleta Slough near U.C. Santa Barbara south to Tijuana Marsh National Wildlife Refuge on the Mexican border but most of them are not healthy enough today to support very many Clapper Rails.

When the Light-footed Clapper Rail was first listed as endangered, it was not clear how many of them were left.  People didn’t even know how to count them because they are extremely secretive and live in thick vegetation.  The most reliable of the old survey techniques was to wait for an extreme high tide, usually they occur in winter daylight in our area, and count the exposed rails.  The problem with this technique is that most of the wetlands occupied by Clapper Rails aren’t inundated enough even during the highest tides to expose all of the birds for counting.  When we started trying to understand and help rails in 1979 one of the first things we tackled was how to count them accurately.  What we found was that you could spend hundreds of hours per wetland during the breeding season searching out their nests and thereby document the population total or you could listen to their calls under the right conditions and get the same exact result.

The Light-footed Clapper Rail was declared an endangered species in 1973.  Now, 31 years later it is still endangered but certainly better off than it was because of the protection and management efforts its listing made possible.  These birds depend upon one of the most productive habitats we have in southern CA, coastal salt marsh.  By the late 1960s more than 70% of the coastal marshes in southern CA had been dredged for marinas or near-shore housing, or had been filled in and built upon.  Most of the marsh acreage left was highly degraded and continues to be affected by the millions of people living on its very edge.

View a short movie clip titled "Tales of the Light-Footed Clapper Rail".

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The Clapper Rail was listed as an endangered species because it was thought to be in imminent danger of extinction.  These birds only make it in one kind of habitat and most of that habitat was destroyed or badly altered.  The very first benefit of being an endangered species is that each individual bird is immediately protected by law from being harmed or even harassed.  But, the real goal of the Endangered Species Act is to list a species to protect it in the short term, figure out what’s wrong, fix it and eventually recover the species, meaning to de-list it or take it off the endangered species list.

The Clapper Rail Study Team was formed in 1985 in an effort to expand volunteer opportunities to rail recovery effort.  Study Team members help observe the rails, trap and band, search for nests, do call counts, etc.  The participants have come from all walks of life including students, engineers, policemen, mathematicians, administrative assistants, homemakers, and retirees, among many others.  Folks start as volunteers and once they catch on, they share in whatever grant money and donations we may have available.

 Today, the southern CA subspecies of Clapper Rail is doing better than it has since we started monitoring the southern CA population.  We know that someday we will recover this bird and its valuable habitat but that is down the road.  Southern California coastal wetlands are now finally valued about as high as they should be and they are being protected, managed, and restored.  However, salt marsh restoration is an excruciatingly slow process, as will be Clapper Rail recovery.  In the meanwhile a handful of us will continue to watch, study, learn, and act on behalf of this little endangered champion of wetland wildlife.