Kosrae Crake Porzana monasa. Original artwork from A Gap in Nature.

2000.
Watercolour and gouache on Arches paper, 235 x 320mm, framed, signed and dated by artist.

Last Record: between December 1827 and January 1828. Distribution: Kosrae, Caroline Islands.

The Kosrae crake was a fairly large, dark-coloured and possibly flightless member of the rail family. Just two examples now remain, both held in St Petersburg, and both collected by von Kittlitz in marshes at sea level. Even in von Kittlitz's time the species appears to have been uncommon.
Long after its extinction the bird's habits were recalled by the people of Kosrae, who related what they remembered to members of the Whitney South Seas Expedition, when they visited the island in 1931. The islanders called it the nay-tai-mai-not, meaning `to land in the taro garden'. W. E Coultas, who participated in the expedition, wrote:
In the olden days it was a sacred bird, but since the Christian missions have been established not much attention has been paid to older faiths ...Several oldsters seem to remember their forefathers' speaking of the bird, but none of them admitted having seen it, except an elderly Deacon, a staunch pillar of the Church, who claimed to have had it pointed out to him twenty years previous to my visit.
When Otto Finsch visited Kosrae in 1881 he found the place overrun with rats, but neither saw nor heard any sign of the crake. The rats-presumably black rats (Rattus rattus) were still in plague proportions fifty years later when Coultas visited, and they may well have been the principal cause of the birds' decline.