Zapata Rail

• Its epithet honours Fermín Zanón Cervera, a Spanish soldier who stayed on in Cuba after the Spanish-American War and became a professional naturalist: he was the one who discovered it.
• Its short wings leave it with almost no power of flight, the same evolutionary fate as so many isolated rails.
• Barbour and Peters thought it so distinctive that they created a genus of its own for it, Cyanolimnas, from the Greek kuanos, dark blue, and limnas, rail.
• It is almost unable to fly and lives in a single wetland in the world: the Zapata Swamp, a place that holds several species found nowhere else, among them Fernandina's flicker and a Zapata wren of its own.
• Its main threats are introduced mongooses and rats and the African catfish, an invasive fish that eats the chicks, as well as the burning of the marsh vegetation.
• It was discovered in 1927 and for decades there were stretches of years without a single confirmed record, which led on several occasions to fears that it had gone extinct.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (bird)

Habitat & environment

Freshwater marshes with dense vegetation of the Zapata Swamp, in Cuba

Sexual maturity

12 months

Gestation / incubation

20 days of incubation

Litter / clutch size

3 eggs

Sources consulted: IUCN Red List; DiBird (familia Rallidae); Wikipedia (Zapata rail); Barbour y Peters 1927; IOC World Bird List 2023

Best time: All year round in the Zapata Swamp, though it is extremely hard to see