This is bird note.

While the Great Lakes region has lost over half of its original wetlands,

some are now being restored. But secretive marsh birds called rails might not realize these

are good habitats for them unless they hear other rails calling and hanging out. Mike Ward

is an avian ecologist at the University of Illinois.

I like to use the analogy of humans and restaurants.

So if you go buy a restaurant and there's no one there, the thought is it's not very good, right? So you assume that there's

something wrong with it. You go by another restaurant, there's a bunch of cars there, you

think well I must be the place to go, you stop and eat there. Mike says the same can be true for

birds.

So to try to trick rails,

audio playback stations were set up in and around a restored wetland area in Michigan.

Loudspeakers played recorded rail calls on a loop during their migration.

Mike Ward says it's like matchmaking.

It's kind of like e-harmony, right? So just trying to get this case birds together at the same

place at the same time and so they interact you know we've destroyed a lot of habitat some

bird populations are pretty low and so the chances of them finding each other are kind of slim right and

so all we're trying to do is provide a cue then they start you know mating pairing raising

young those kind of things.

Dustin Brewer the researcher who conducted this study in Michigan, says three different species

of rails, including a rare king rail, were spotted near these playback test sites.

So it seems the audio experiment did the trick.

...