Barred-winged Rail Nesoclopeus poecilopterus. Original artwork from A Gap in Nature.

2000.
Watercolour and gouache on Arches paper, 425 x 680mm, framed, signed and dated by artist.

Last Record: 5.35p.m., 28 June 1973. Distribution: Viti Levu and Ovalau, Fiji.

The barred-winged rail was a secretive, poorly flighted and evidently nocturnal bird around the size of a half-grown chicken. It inhabited dense swamps and taro gardens. Neither its voice nor food were recorded, though some eggs were collected last century, which are cream-brown in colour, with purplish and red blotches. It is known from less than a dozen museum specimens, all collected during the nineteenth century.
The species was long considered to be extinct until D. T. Holyoak visited Fiji in 1973 and carried out intensive bird surveys for two months. He sighted a barred-winged rail in the Vundiawa area of Viti Levu. It was seen in a 'small valley with old overgrown taro and banana plantations among thickets of bamboo and tall ferns under the cover of tall, well-spaced trees'. Despite much searching, he found no evidence of the species on Taveuni. The species appears to have been rare even before European contact, but the introductions of the mongoose and brown and black rats to Fiji are doubtless responsible for its further decline.