What’s the most abundant bird you’ve never seen?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The answer, as often as not, is a rail. And here in northeastern North America, it’s often the Sora<\/strong><\/a>, that pudgy yellow-billed denizen of muddy cattail marshes.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n On September 23, 1882, Wirt Robinson purchased the corpses of two leucistic\u00a0Sora<\/strong>s<\/a> from the back of a wagon in Richmond, Virginia. In that wagon: “between 900 and 1,000\u00a0dozen<\/em> sora, nearly all ‘paddled<\/a>‘ in Curl’s Neck Marsh, on James River.”<\/p>\n That’s ten to twelve thousand\u00a0Soras\u00a0<\/strong>from a single mid-Atlantic marsh. How many have you seen this year?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … <\/p>\n![\"n166_w1150\"](\"http:\/\/farm7.staticflickr.com\/6054\/6302201803_29c43c257d_z.jpg\")
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