Tahiti rail plantations. Its diet appears to have consisted mainly of insects and occasionally copra (coconut meat). The extinction of the Tahiti rail was probably due to predation by humans and introduced cats and rats. It appears to have become extinct some time after 1844 on Tahiti, and perhaps as late as the 1930s on Mehetia. The Tahiti rail was found on the South Pacific island of Tahiti (part of the Society Islands archipelago) by naturalists who were part of the British explorer James Cook's second voyage around the world (1772–1775). The bird was illustrated by Georg Forster, who accompanied his father,
Trouble in Tahiti at Carnegie Hall. With the permission of the Leonard Bernstein Office Inc., The Chinese University of Hong Kong Chorus gave a semi-staged performance of the opera with a chamber choir substituting the Trio as scored. On 17 June 2018, the Chorus performed the adaptation with Garth Edwin Sunderland's reduced orchestration in their Leonard Bernstein centennial celebration concert "Bernstein in the Theater" at Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall. Bernstein wrote a continuation, "A Quiet Place" (1983, libretto by Stephen Wadsworth), which was poorly received. It was rewritten incorporating "Trouble in Tahiti" in the form of an extended flashback. The opera,