Lord Howe woodhen

Appearance

The Lord Howe woodhen is a medium-sized olive-brown rail, with a short tail, downcurved bill, red iris, and chestnut wings.

The Lord Howe woodhen also known as the Lord Howe Island woodhen, Lord Howe wood rail, Lord Howe rail or Lord Howe Island rail, is a flightless bird of the rail family, Rallidae.

The male measures 34–42 cm (13–17 in) in length, and weighs 410–780 g (0.90–1.72 lb). With a wingspan of 49–52 cm (19–20 in).

Published measurements include mass about 536 and wingspan about 50.5.

Range and habitat

It is endemic to Lord Howe Island off the Australian coast.

Prior its discovery in 1788, Lord Howe Island had no history of human settlement, and when European explorers first arrived the woodhen was one of fifteen terrestrial bird species. Although rats were responsible for the extinction of five of Lord Howe Island's endemic bird species, there was no evidence they played a role in the decline of the woodhen.

GBIF currently lists 11,881 occurrence points. Those points follow where people logged the taxon — museum drawers and surveys included — not a closed range boundary.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Breeding

Woodhens mate for life and are usually encountered in pairs. The nest is a shallow depression on the ground, in that 1–4 eggs are laid in captivity.

In crisis

Initially common, the woodhen population declined rapidly, and by the late 19th century it had become very rare. When the population was first surveyed in the early 1970s, only a dozen breeding pairs remained, restricted to the inaccessible peaks of the island's two mountains, Mount Gower and Mount Lidgbird. In response, a programme of ex-situ conservation (captive breeding) took place between 1980 and 1984, and 81 individuals were released into the wild, albeit with a low survival rate.

The success of this two-part recovery programme allowed the Lord Howe woodhen population to increase ten-fold, from a low of 20 birds in the 1970s to around 200 in 1985. Rather than a sustained increase, even so, this growth quickly plateaued, and between 1988 and 2019 the woodhen population remained small but stable.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Lord Howe woodhen is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Lord Howe woodhen, Wikidata item Q27460329 and GBIF occurrence geography. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.