Come summer, sighting the shy, pint-sized members of the Rallidae family gets easier

When fed into Latin, pusilla comes out denoting “very small”. The Baillon’s crake can be missed in the field, when it is at a distance, as the magnification of the human eye is woefully short of what it takes to pick up this tiny creature. The other factor is the Baillon’s crake’s predisposition to present less of itself: it moves about furtively and slides into the reeds at the slightest suspicion of being noticed. But if you are keen on observing the Baillon’s crake or the ruddy breasted crake in the field, in Chennai, this would be the best time to put in efforts towards that end. These birds live amidst reeds, the bulrushes, which are likely to lose their density now as they would shrivel and go brown, leaving wide gaps, thereby reducing the cover for these tiddly birds to stay inscrutable.

As humans are christened around birth, before their character becomes manifest and their frame takes complete shape, there is always the possibility that their name might suggest the opposite of what the people around them largely perceive their character to be or that it is in embarrassing contradiction to their physical structure. Birds being named after their prominent features that are out there for the universe to see, the alignment between what they are and what they are called comes with the accuracy of railroad track geometry. Zapornia pusilla — Baillon’s crake in watercooler conversations — is as spot-on as a binomial name can get.

When fed into Latin, pusilla comes out denoting “very small”. The Baillon’s crake can be missed in the field, when it is at a distance, as the magnification of the human eye is woefully short of what it takes to pick up this tiny creature. The other factor is the Baillon’s crake’s predisposition to present less of itself: it moves about furtively and slides into the reeds at the slightest suspicion of being noticed. 

But if you are keen on observing the Baillon’s crake or the ruddy breasted crake in the field, in Chennai, this would be the best time to put in efforts towards that end. These birds live amidst reeds, the bulrushes, which are likely to lose their density now as they would shrivel and go brown, leaving wide gaps, thereby reducing the cover for these tiddly birds to stay inscrutable.

This Baillon’s crake — captured in photographs at Perumbakkam wetland on February 12, 2025 — had to come out of hiding to rinse itself in water and had to continue in the public glare to dry itself. Once the cleaning and preening exercise was complete, it scurried to the privacy of dried-up bulrushes. Again, it took the magnification of a telephoto lens to have a good look at what this tiny crake was up to. 

Besides the lack of a private bath, the absence of room service (no ringing of a bell to order food from the bedside) means the Baillon’s crake makes itself visible — even then only being partially scrutable —when hunger pangs gnaws at its innards. It probes for insects in shallow water.