Cheryl-Samantha Owen

The Tortoise and the Rail went to Sea 

Like the hare, the Aldabra White-Throated Rail, cannot fly. It has large wings, a characteristic contrary to expectations of flightless bird forms, but usually only fans them wide in a move to make itself look larger than life when defending its nest and chicks. Like the hare, the Rail can also leap - another use for its wings, but it is has long been considered the last flightless bird of the Western Indian Ocean Islands. Considering the fame attributed to the dodo, a flightless bird endemic to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, which man pushed to extinction in the 17th Century, the very much alive Rail deserves its share of the limelight.

Over the years humans and introduced predators such as cats, which have since been eradicated on some islands, have caused local extinctions and range reductions and today two subspecies survive, one on Madagascar and one on three of Aldabra’s islands. I met my first Rail shortly after arriving here on Picard Island, which thanks to a re-introduction of the species in 1999, is now running with rails, but I didn’t really get to know the Rail until we rode the rough seas to the northern side of the Atoll and camped in a place affectionately known as ‘middle camp’ a few days ago. Situated near the mouth of Pass Houareau in between the islands of Malabar and Grande Terre is a little wooden hut with a corrugated tin roof that crawls with coconut crabs scratching their claws across the tin, which screeches like nails down a chalkboard, all night, and clinks with dimorphic egrets catching insects in the guttering in the early hours of the morning. Sleep was not a priority anyhow as we were there to photograph the marine life of the mangrove forests and the frigatebirds and boobies nesting in foliage above.

A tropical down pour on our first morning at middle camp, forced us to shift gears slightly as the bad light rendered photography underwater in the dark mangrove forests impossible and I was left photographing this little bird, endemic to Aldabra on the coral rubble around the camp. Their breast musculature is simply too small for them to engage enough power for level flight, and they evolved on Aldabra in the absence of any predators as ground foragers without any apparent need to fly. Flightlessness does come with perks, as flight muscles are amongst the most energetically demanding organs in a bird, thus lacking them has energetic advantages, and one theory is that the original impetus for them becoming flightless may have stemmed from their need to store fat during periods of scarcity – making flight difficult.

Another character joined us on Malabar that has kept us company since our Save Our Seas Foundation expedition team first impressed footprints on this shore here. Slowly and steadily four elephantine legs covered in tough leather and etched with rough scales climbed over the crest of the beach slope from seemingly out of the blue and headed directly towards my toes. Aldabra’s very own giant tortoises are almost as old as the Atoll itself. They are the old men of the island, the equivalent of sharks in the marine world; they too survived millions of years prior to man’s arrival, and only thanks to the difficulty sailors had in penetrating this coral limestone fortress and the foresight of early conservationists do these herbivorous reptiles still dominate Aldabra’s living natural history museum today. Elsewhere they have gone the way of the dodo.

Like the fabled Tortoise this Aldabra fossil has so far won the race for survival and, in our camp at least, beat the Rail to eating most of our food leftovers. Despite the Rail’s beautiful rusty red and forest green feathers its attention span and dedication to eating paled in comparison to that of the tortoise’s, who sat wafting onion breath around our camp.

I hope that slow and steady will prove one day to win the global conservation race, but now we need to accelerate our pace in working together to help save our seas, especially the sharks who, although they have lived on our planet for millions of years, are struggling in this day and age to survive in the wake of their decimation by our species. We did eventually leave the tortoise and the rail and spent two magical afternoons on a high incoming tide photographing the mangrove forests, a shark and fish nursery ground that is crucial for the repopulation of our oceans.

…Stories from Aldabra’s mangroves next week, meanwhile, visit http://www.saveourseas.com to learn more about SOSF, the marine environment and to read my daily blog of the Aldabra Expedition