African Crake - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

The rails are a bird family comprising nearly 150 species. Although the origins of the group are lost in antiquity, the largest number of species and the most primitive forms are found in the Old World, suggesting that this family originated there. The taxonomy of the small crakes is complicated, but the closest relative of the African Crake is the Corn Crake, C. crex, which breeds in Europe and Asia, but winters in Africa. The African Crake was first described as Ortygometra egregia by Wilhelm Peters in 1854 from a specimen collected in Mozambique, but the genus name failed to become established. For some time it was placed as the sole member of the genus Crecopsis but subsequently moved to Crex, created for this species by German naturalist and ornithologist Johann Matthäus Bechstein in 1803. Richard Bowdler Sharpe considered that the African bird differed sufficiently from the Corn Crake to have its own genus Crecopsis, and later authors sometimes placed it in Porzana, based on a resemblance to the Ash-throated Crake, P. albicollis. Structural differences rule out Porzana, and the placement in Crex is now the most common and best-supported treatment. Phylogeny and morphology confirm that the Porzana crakes are the closest relatives of the Crex genus. The genus name is onomatopoeic, referring to the repetitive grating call of the Corn Crake, and the species name egregia derives from Latin egregius, "outstanding, prominent".