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,
Tahiti rail accounts, the Tahiti rail was sufficiently well documented for there to be no doubt that it existed. The Tahiti rail has historically been confused with the extant Tongan subspecies of the buff-banded rail, "Gallirallus philippensis ecaudatus", which was also illustrated and described by the Forsters. In his 1783 description of the Tongan bird (wherein it was named "Rallus eucaudata"), the English ornithologist John Frederick Miller erroneously gave its locality as Tahiti, which led the Tahiti rail to be regarded as a junior synonym of the extant bird. He based his description on Forster's illustration (plate no.127) of the Tongan bird,