Sora are making most of what's left

Truck stop wetland is cause for reflection.

TWiB is taking a week off. Please enjoy this vintage post from May 2019.

Sora photo provided by Jamie Burning.

The other day I was watching a Sora work its way along the edge of a northwest Indiana marsh. A Sora is a type of rail, a small, secretive bird of summer wetlands in the Midwest. The phrase “skinny as a rail” alludes to these birds, which are slender enough to ease their way between cattails without disturbing them a bit. Sora, while fairly common, are often heard more than they’re seen so I was pleased to have a clear view.

In terms of the aesthetics of its surroundings, the Sora wasn’t in the prettiest place. Cars and trucks were screaming down I-94 a few hundred yards away. There were not one but two truck stops within view. I could barely make out a voice coming from a factory loudspeaker stating “Mack, Line 2, Mack, Line 2” or something similar. A liquor store proclaiming “the coldest beer on earth” was across the road from the marsh. Yet the Sora was in the heart of the Calumet region, once home to mighty prehistoric marshes spanning the southern end of Lake Michigan and what’s now Illinois and Indiana. Whether Mack picked up on Line 2 that day, I’m not sure.

Sora have been nesting in the marshes of the Calumet for millennia. It’s only in the past century or so, a split second in evolutionary time, that they have encountered the unrelenting forces of development.  As the truck stops were built, marshes were drained, prairies became parking lots and forests were cleared for houses and highways. Sora kept returning to these smaller and smaller parcels of land and water. Though countless thousands of these birds surely have been permanently lost. 

Looking at the marsh, I wondered whether anyone thought about the Sora when the tide of industry began to claim the land and water. Maybe some hardcore conservationists did. It was then tempting to frame it more positively, as if I was in the bargaining stage of grief. Well, the water here must be clean enough for these birds to be present. This marsh hasn’t been filled in all the way. But thinking that is a lot like the old Chris Rock bit, about bragging about things you're supposed to do: “I take care of my kids. At least I’ve never been to jail.” 

There are few places where the juxtaposition of nature and industry is as apparent as in the Calumet. In a landscape so scarred, the only option is to try to heal the land and these waters. And perhaps the Sora will have a few safe havens for another millennium.

British artist and naturalist painted this Gallinule, a relative of the Sora, for his seminal “The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands,” c. 1722-1726.