Spotted rail
The spotted rail is a species of bird in the family Rallidae.
It is found in Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Cayman Islands, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guyana, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela, and possibly Honduras.
The spotted rail is found in marshland and swamps.Taxonomy
The spotted rail was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1781 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected in French Guiana. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Rallus maculatus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The spotted rail is now placed in the genus Pardirallus that was erected by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1856. The generic name combines the Ancient Greek pardos meaning "leopard" with the genus Rallus. The specific epithet maculatus is Latin for "spotted" or "blotched"
Two subspecies are recognised:
- P. m. insolitus – Mexico to Costa Rica
- P. m. maculatus – Colombia to east Brazil south to Peru and Argentina, Caribbean
