THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, September 7, 1994 TAG: 9409030198
SECTION: ISLE OF WIGHT CITIZEN PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Around Town
SOURCE: Linda McNatt
LENGTH: Medium: 98 lines
The first hint of fall - shorter days, a single leaf drifting across the highway, busy squirrels stocking up for winter - almost always elicits conversations about hunting in this rural part of Hampton Roads.
And this year, I'm hearing about a kind of hunting I haven't heard about before.
Elusive creatures known as sora rails, a type of water birds, make themselves visible only during certain weather conditions - the worst kind of conditions, like northeasters, for example. Necessary equipment is a lightweight boat designed to be poled through mud.
``No motor power, no sail power, just muscle power,'' one enthusiast told me.
You could find yourself walking chest deep in water to flush the little buggers out. And once you've accomplished that, the prize is only slightly larger than a quail, so you must start all over again - several times - to even come close to getting a meal.
Must be a male thing.
The first hint of excitement I heard came from Buddy Champman, a native of this county lucky enough to have 75,000 acres of marshes, where the shy little rails feed and hide most of the time.
Historically, colonists knew them as ``marsh hens,'' I'm told, and since I have recollection of numerous references to such in a lot of historical novels I've read, I can only imagine the rails were a good source of food for our ancestors.
They bear out the fact that once there were lots of them around, Chapman brought an article from a Sept. 17, 1908, edition of The Virginian-Pilot. The article said that two Smithfield men, one of them Chapman's father, had bagged rather large catches of sora rails on one particular day. Jim Chapman killed 204. P.D. Gwaltney killed 164.
Local hunting legend says that sporting men would come from all up and down the Atlantic Seaboard and from as far away as the Midwest to hunt rail in the marshes of Isle of Wight County.
Chapman said there aren't as many rails - in four varieties - sora, clapper, Virginia and king - as there used to be, but they are coming back.
Rails, it seems, according to a recent edition of the ``Chesapeake Bay Magazine,'' suffered many of the same problems that other water birds like eagles and osprey have suffered.
Environmental problems took the numbers down. But there has historically been a legal hunting season on the little birds that run on the ground like quail. Rails, unlike some of their feathered friends, have never been threatened with extinction.
``The season has never stopped completely,'' said Gary Costanzo, waterfowl program leader for the Virginia Commission of Game and Inland Fisheries. ``And there are still some avid rail hunters out there. They haven't declined like a lot of the birds. The biggest problem is that their habitat has disappeared. It's an interesting, neat way of hunting. It's kind of a traditional thing.''
Chapman said he first realized that people were beginning to get excited about rail hunting again when he talked with ``young'' Bobby Clontz. And Clontz confirmed that he and his brother are banking on rail hunting this fall. It was something the boys and their late father, Bobby Clontz, had talked about for years, he said. But they never got to do much of it.
Clontz said the rails are like a quail in more than their size. They mostly prefer running on their chicken-like feet to flying. The high tide and disturbance are about the only thing that forces them into flight.
``Rails spend most of their time on their feet, so you rarely see them,'' Clontz said. ``You may spend all day just searching for them, trying to scare them up.''
But you can do it only when the tide is extra high. Some call it a ``spring tide,'' others describe it as the kind of tide that comes during a northeaster. Otherwise, the birds hide in the marsh grass.
``It's a very, very old sport,'' Bob Lewis of the Carrollton Sportsman Shop said. ``You've got to have an extremely high tide, with a good northeast wind blowing. They are very good eating. I think it's one of those things that everybody has to try, but there's a lot of work involved, poling that boat through the marshes. I think some people probably try it to relieve the boredom until duck season arrives.''
Rail season this year starts next Tuesday and lasts through Nov. 20. You can hunt them from a half-hour before sunrise until sunset. The limits are much stricter than they once were. You can bag 25 sora rails or Virginia rails, counted together, each day.
It sounds like an interesting way to spend a day, slogging through marshes, getting soaked by the rain, scaring little birds that do little more than eat grass seed and hide.
The excitement this fall, just like it was almost a century ago, is rail hunting.
But rail hunting wasn't the only excitement in Isle of Wight around that time. As a foot note, this item: ``Smithfield to have Y.M.C.A. in near future.''
That 1908 edition of The Virginian-Pilot said, ``Some subscriptions were handed in and more will be forthcoming.''
Wonder if they ever got their money back? ILLUSTRATION: The elusive sora rail makes itself visible only during certain
weather conditions.
by CNB