Water rail
Water rails are omnivorous, although they mainly feed on animals. These include leeches, worms, gastropods, small crustaceans, spiders, and a wide range of both terrestrial and aquatic insects and their larvae. Small vertebrates such as amphibians, fish, birds and mammals may be killed or eaten as carrion. Vertebrates are impaled with a strike of the bill which breaks the prey's spinal cord. Plant food, which is consumed more in autumn and winter, includes the buds, flowers, shoots and seeds of water plants, berries and fruit. In south Asia, paddy (harvested rice kernels) may sometimes be eaten. The young rails are fed mainly on insects and spiders. Food obtained on land or from mud is normally washed in water before it is eaten. After rain, rails may probe soft ground for earthworms. This species will occasionally feed in the open even when not forced to do so by cold weather; Edmund Meade-Waldo described seven rails feeding in an open meadow. Despite its skulking nature, the water rail appears to thrive in captivity when fed on animal food such as raw meat or earthworms; one individual was taught to jump for worms suspended from a fishing rod.
Grey-necked wood rail
Placed in the family Rallidae—the rails—this species was originally described as "Fulica Cajanea" by Philipp Ludwig Statius Müller, in his 1776 "Vollständiges Natursystem". Müller based his description on the illustration “Poule d’Eau de Cayenne” (Cayenne’s water hen) by French naturalist and artist Edme-Louis Daubenton in his "Planches Enlumineés d’Histoire Naturelle". It was eventually moved to the new genus "Aramides", the wood rails, by Jacques Pucheran in 1845, and the specific epithet was changed to "cajaneus".