A fun question to ask new birders and old:
What’s the most abundant bird you’ve never seen?
The answer, as often as not, is a rail. And here in northeastern North America, it’s often the Sora, that pudgy yellow-billed denizen of muddy cattail marshes.
Even with so many of its breeding sites gone — especially in the southern portion of the species’ range — this remains a fairly common bird. But numbers are nothing like they once were.
On September 23, 1882, Wirt Robinson purchased the corpses of two leucistic Soras from the back of a wagon in Richmond, Virginia. In that wagon: “between 900 and 1,000 dozen sora, nearly all ‘paddled‘ in Curl’s Neck Marsh, on James River.”
That’s ten to twelve thousand Soras from a single mid-Atlantic marsh. How many have you seen this year?
