Galápagos Rail seen on island where Charles Darwin discovered it for first time in 200 years

A tiny black bird was spotted on a Galápagos island for the first time in nearly 200 years — when Charles Darwin first discovered it.

The Galápagos Rail, considered a near-endangered species, has returned to its native Floreana Island after conservationists removed wild cat and rat populations that had driven the population out centuries earlier, Island Conservation announced last week.

Researchers found the birds frolicking in the lush brush at three distinct locations during a recent landbird monitoring expedition, which is “enough to call them a real population.”

“The rediscovery of the Galápagos Rail confirms what we’ve seen on islands worldwide—remove the invasive threats, and native species can recover in remarkable ways,” Paula Castaño, the group’s Conservation Impact Program Manager said in a statement.

The last confirmed sighting of the “small, secretive” bird, locally known as Pachays, was also its official discovery in 1835, when Darwin discovered several species during his famed journey to the Galápagos.

The Rail is a poor flier and dwells on the ground, making it especially vulnerable to predators. When invasive species like cats and rats infiltrated the island, the Rail population seemingly vanished.

The “resilient and resourceful little birds” were rediscovered by Wilson Cabrera, a local Island Restoration Specialist with research group Jocotoco, at a site that has been monitored by researchers since 2015.

The birds were away from human habitation and agriculture, in a grassland shaded by guava trees.

“This finding is a reflection of the ongoing efforts dedicated to the ecological restoration of Floreana and a further step towards the conservation of its biodiversity,” Cabrera said in a statement.

Their return to Floreana comes two years after Island Conservation and its partners began removing invasive species that put the birds at risk. It also follows a similar comeback in 2018 on nearby Pinzon Island after rodents were eradicated there in 2012.

Whether the birds escaped to other nearby islands, or had been hiding on Floreana the whole time is not known.

Researchers will next use genetic sampling to determine whether these newly recorded birds are from a self-reintroduced lineage or whether there was a tiny population of Rails that survived, undetected, for 190 years.