 At any rate, both light and dark birds are today treated as a single species, with five of the junior synonyms referring to the dark form.However, "Rallus obscurus" is something of a mystery as it is generally assumed that at the time of Gmelin's writing, the species was only known from light birds (which were described as "sandwichensis" on the preceding page of Gmelin's work), but he seems to have seen a specimen of his "obscurus" at the Leverian Museum.The native name for the bird was moho, said to refer to a small "bird that crows in the grass".