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Grey-breasted Crake | Laterallus exilis
Amazonedwergral | Polluela pechigrís
The Grey-breasted Crake is a small, grey and brown crake with a chestnut nape, which in the guide area occurs patchily and locally from southern Mexico to Panama. Like most small crakes it nearly always stays hidden in dense, wet vegetation and is heard far more often than seen. The range consists of a series of separate pockets.
Voice
A series of two to ten clear, metallic tink notes, often slightly descending in pitch; also a descending, musical rattle and a soft, sharp chek. Calls both by day and at night.
Recording: Juan Freile — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
14–15 cm, small and short-tailed. Head, sides of the neck and breast are pale grey, the throat white, and the nape strikingly chestnut. The rest of the upperparts is olive-brown. The flanks, belly and undertail are barred black and white. The bill is short and greenish, with a darker upper mandible, the eye red and the legs yellowish-brown. Male and female are alike. Juveniles are duller and greyer, with less chestnut on the nape and a dark eye.
Confusion species
White-throated Crake Laterallus albigularis has a rufous rather than grey head and breast. Ruddy Crake Laterallus ruber is plain rufous with a dark grey head and lacks the barring. Yellow-breasted Crake Laterallus flaviventer is smaller, with an ochre-yellow face, a dark eye-stripe, a white supercilium and yellow legs. Black Rail Laterallus jamaicensis is dark slate-grey with white speckles on the back.
Habitat
Wet grasslands and shallow standing water with dense grasses and rushes: edges of marshes, rivers and lakes, rice fields and wet pastures; also drier places with tall grass, such as rough pastures and grassy areas along airstrips. In the guide area from sea level to about 1200 m. Feeds on insects, spiders and seeds. The nest is a domed structure of grass with a side entrance, low in dense vegetation.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
In Mexico rare and very local, mainly in southern Veracruz and further in Tabasco and Chiapas. Further local in Belize, mainly in Toledo and Cayo, in Petén, Izabal and Alta Verapaz in Guatemala, in northern Honduras around Lake Yojoa and in the lowlands of Cortés, in the Caribbean lowlands of Nicaragua, and scattered in Costa Rica and Panama, on both sides of the mountains. Outside the guide area in a series of separate pockets in northern and central South America, to Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
The species can almost only be found by voice: the series of clear tink notes gives away where the bird is. Wet, grassy edges of marshes and rice fields are the most promising, especially in the early morning. A bird crossing the edge of a ditch or track is often all that is seen.
Conservation status
Not threatened; the species has a large range and adapts well to human-altered wet grasslands. Because of its secretive habits and scattered sites, its true distribution in the guide area is probably larger than known.
Scientific name
Laterallus exilis | (Temminck, 1831)
Temminck described the species in 1831 as Rallus exilis; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Laterallus was introduced in 1855 by Gray. Laterallus is a contraction of Rallus lateralis, an old synonym of the Rufous-sided Crake; Latin lateralis 'of the side' refers to the coloured flanks. exilis is Latin for 'small, slender', after its tiny size. The specimen the first description was based on came from Cayenne, French Guiana (designated later).