| An awkward, yet powerful gait catches my attention as I near Arrowhead Marsh. Visually stunning but generally elusive, a California clapper rail (Rallus longirostris obsoletus) tumbles haphazardly from the cordgrass into the tidal slough before me. I am captivated as I curiously watch this fleet-footed and slightly clumsy bird quickly regain its feet!
 The endangered California clapper rail roosts under the dense cover of tall marsh grass and forages among the vanishing tidal sloughs and mud flats of San Francisco Bay. Often seen during low tide at Arrowhead Marsh - part of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Regional Shoreline Park - this rail is a colorful sight with its rust-orange breast, salt and pepper stripped flanks, and white undertail feathers. If you don’t catch a glimpse of the rail’s chicken-like body perched atop its stilt-like legs, you’re certain to hear the unmistakable call from its red-orange downward-curving beak; clattering KLEK-KLEK-KLEK. Once spied, it’s often found probing the mud with its noisy beak for nourishing morsels such as worms, mussels, fish and other small invertebrates. This is an essential task, but increased exposure to predators makes this one of the rails most hazardous activities.
Not just a hunter, it is also hunted; the rail was once nearly "served up" to extinction for early San Francisco settlers. Fortunately, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1918) saved the California clapper rail from the gastronomic desires of the day. No longer a delicacy, its threat today is Bay fill. The loss of its protective wetland buffer has made this brightly hued and nearly flightless bird an easy meal for newly-introduced predators, such as the introduced red fox and Norwegian rat, as well as feral cats. These predators live and hunt in the drier upland habitats adjoining the Bay’s marshlands. Due to draining and filling of marshes around the Bay, the once-extensive wetlands have nearly vanished from the Bay. Consequently, a predator’s trip from upland areas to capture a clapper rail is no longer through a soggy mile-wide marsh, but is a dry, easy stroll over a constructed levee or other developed area.
With 85 percent of the rail's prime habitat lost since 1850, recent increases in its population indicate a turn in the 150-year tide of habitat degradation. Credit for these gains is due to the many citizens, environmental groups, and agencies that support habitat restoration and mitigation projects. Hopefully, similar efforts will continue to echo the California clapper rails boisterous KLEK-KLEK-KLEKs throughout the Bay’s wetlands.
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