All species › Cranes, rails and allies › Rails and crakes › Baillon's Crake
Baillon's Crake | Zapornia pusilla
Kleinst waterhoen | Polluela Chica
Baillon's Crake is the smallest rail in the region, barely longer than a sparrow. Unlike the Spotted and Little Crakes it breeds in southern Africa, but it lives so secretively in low marsh vegetation that it often goes unnoticed.
Voice
A dry, frog-like rattle, trrrr-trrrr, like a fingernail drawn along a comb, often repeated at night and at dusk. Also a soft chek and a short croak.
Recording: Bosco Dies / BirdingAlbufera — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
About 17 cm, compact, with short wings whose primaries barely project beyond the tertials. The upperparts are warm rufous-brown, densely marked with black streaks and irregular white spots and lines. Face, neck and breast are blue-grey; flanks, belly and undertail are crisply barred black and white. The bill is short and green without a red base, the eye red and the legs flesh-coloured to greenish. The sexes are nearly alike, the female sometimes with a paler throat. Juveniles are buff below with barring extending onto the breast.
Confusion species
The Little Crake (Zapornia parva) is slimmer, with long primaries, a red bill base, green legs, far less white on the back and faint flank barring. The Spotted Crake (Porzana porzana) is larger, densely spotted white on the head and breast, with a buff undertail. The Striped Crake (Aenigmatolimnas marginalis) has white longitudinal streaks and a rufous, unbarred undertail. The African Crake (Crecopsis egregia) is larger and also has barred flanks, but a dark-spotted back without white markings.
Habitat
Dense, low vegetation of sedges, rushes, grass and young reeds in shallow water and on wet mud, the edges of vleis, dams, sewage works and flooded grassland. It creeps under cover along the waterline and runs quickly between stems. It eats small aquatic insects, larvae, tiny snails and seeds.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Scattered and local over much of the region: in South Africa on the Highveld, in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern and Western Cape, and also in Lesotho, Eswatini, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, the Okavango in Botswana, northern Namibia and Angola; absent from the dry interior. Beyond the region in East Africa and on Madagascar, and in Europe, Asia and Australia.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Best seen at low water in late summer and autumn, when mud edges along the reed fringe dry out. Sit still early at a hide by a vlei or sewage pond and watch for a tiny bird briefly leaving cover. The rattling call often reveals its presence after dark.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened. In southern Africa inconspicuous and probably under-recorded. Sensitive to the draining of vleis and the burning and overgrazing of marsh edges.
Scientific name
Zapornia pusilla | (Pallas, 1776)
Pallas described the species in 1776 as Rallus pusillus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Zapornia was introduced in 1816 by Leach. Zapornia is a near-anagram of Porzana, the genus of the French ornithologist Louis-Pierre Vieillot. pusilla is Latin for 'very small'; this is the smallest crake in Europe. The specimen the first description was based on came from Transbaikalia, Siberia.