Behaviour
This rail is a skulking species, its streaked plumage making it difficult to see in its wetland habitat. Its laterally compressed body allows it to slip though the densest vegetation, and it will "freeze" if surprised in the open. It walks with a high-stepping gait, although it adopts a crouch when it runs for cover. It swims, when necessary, with the jerky motion typical of rails, and it flies short distances low over the reeds with its long legs dangling. Although their flight looks weak, Water Rails are capable of long sustained flights during their nocturnal migrations, and are sometimes killed in collisions with lighthouses or wires. British-ringed birds have been recovered from as far away as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Sweden.
This species defends its breeding and wintering territories. Birds will charge each other with neck outstretched when breeding, sometimes both members of a pair attacking together. Large strongly-marked males are dominant in winter, when the direct aggression is replaced by sharming while standing upright on tip-toe, head jerking and bill thrusting.
Read more about this topic: Water Rail
Famous quotes containing the word behaviour:
“... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, immortal longings.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (18991973)
“The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.”
—Aldous Huxley (18941963)
“The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)