Sometimes birds turn up in unusual places. Birders in Hong Kong were out in force in February–not to some remote parts of the New Territories but to a landscaped building in the heart of Kowloon. There, in the patches of garden around Kowloon Bat Sports Centre, was a crake, a Slaty-legged Crake (Rallina eurizonoides) to be precise, going about the business of searching for food, moving around a bit and having a nap.
In recent years these crakes which are summer visitors to shrubland in the New Territories and passage migrants have been seen occasionally in Hong Kong’s parks behaving rather like this one and ignoring the human inhabitants. Those in shrubland make their presence known by calling at night but are extremely difficult to spot. My guess is that a tired passage migrant will drop down on any bit of flat land in order to recover and stock up its reserves. Tired birds, desperately hungry, can appear to be very tame. In a game of die of starvation or risk predation, the former course wins.
AJP, having photographed the bird, then walked the short distance to IKEA to get what he needed there. There was no report on the consumption, or not, of Swedish meatballs.
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