Deborah Raymond wrote:

>The plight of the beginning birder is remembering all what is seen in the
>field until one gets home to start looking up what one thinks is a bird,
>in this case a Virginia Rail. Just east of the IMA here at the UW campus
>is a drainage ditch that usually has ducks in it. I was noticing that
>there was very little water in it now ( possibly because of the new drain
>pipe put in last summer over by one of the playing fields). Anyway there
>is now a large swath of mud/silt on both sides of a trickle of a
>"stream", there also are a few fallen branches between the mud and the
>dead grasses. It was here that I spooked and was spooked by what I think
>was a Virginia Rail. It had orange legs and feet, a longish bill, and
>sorta brown/buff striped on the back. But, it had to sprint beside the
>branches to get to the grasses, and to help it along it gave 2 flaps of
>its wings with the axillars a buffy color. No where in any guide books
>is there a mention of the color of the axillars. What a way to learn a
>new bird to make it one's own. So-o-o, was it a Virginia Rail?? thanks

Deborah, I can tell you from just looking at specimens that the axillars
(and the entire underwings) of Virginia Rails are black. However, it's
obvious that you saw a Virginia Rail, so perhaps you were looking at the
anterior sides, which are buffy. The posterior sides are black with narrow
white bars.

Dennis Paulson phone: (206) 756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail: dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416