Weedon’s World
This month, Mike talks about one of his favourite birds – Jack Snipe
It may astonish you (it always does me) to learn that there are an estimated 110,000 Jack Snipes creeping around the damp areas of the UK, each winter. Unlike other lurkers in damp places, like Water Rails or Cetti’s Warblers, Jack Snipes don’t give themselves away by being loudmouths. Instead they quietly bob and feed, bob and feed, unseen and unheard, more than 100,000 of them!
When I was a youngster, visiting my father’s family in Ayrshire, in the summer holidays, my brothers and I claimed to have seen a Jack Snipe on Fenwick Moor. This was terrible stringing, of course, and we were just exaggerating and projecting our wishful thinking on a Snipe, unaware that the Jack Snipe does not really breed on the damp moors of western Scotland.
I only have distant, vague memories of my first ‘real’ Jack Snipe. It was perhaps 40 years ago, on a YOC trip, when I was a teen in London’s southern suburbs, and if I recall correctly, it was at Beddington Sewage Farm, and it was a fleeting flight view.
Years later, I got my first decent views of one bobbing at the edge of a reedbed. I think it was in Kent, but
I have seen more of the blighters in north Norfolk. And they are a delight on the eye; smaller than a Snipe, and with half a Snipe’s bill and a different pattern of stripes.
Their pièce de résistance, though is the ‘bob’ or ‘bounce’. Unlike, say wagtails or Common or Green Sandpipers, Jack Snipes don’t see-saw around a central axis; they bounce vertically! It is countless years since I have witnessed a Jack Snipe bouncing, though. The bouncing is something I have never seen around Peterborough. We do have plenty of Jack Snipes around here, surely, but getting a decent look is another thing.
Until the winter just past I had only once seen a Jack Snipe on the ground in the Peterborough area: one frozen winter, one was feeding in a ditch by a little open water; just visible with a scope.
In the early 2000s a small group of local birders (including me) used to do monthly Jack Snipe surveys of the edge of an artificial lake called CEGB Reservoir in the southern part of the city. We never saw them on the deck, though – it was more of an exercise in controlled flushing. Jack Snipes are very reluctant fliers, crouching and hiding until the last footstep is almost upon them, before rising and flying off maybe 30-50m and dropping again. Our record lunchtime session produced 29 individuals from this one patch!
Sadly, CEGB Reservoir is now overly flooded (and its shore partly surrounded by new houses)and not a Jack Snipe locality any more. Instead, we locals know a very few chosen sites where we see Jack Snipe each year. And, sadly, it is has been by the nearly-treadon-the-bird flush technique.
But, wait! Shhh! A silent, hidden revolution has been going on, in and around wet, reedy margins across the country (and beyond). Over the last few years, birders have started to realise the potential of thermal imaging devices. These are basically the domestic equivalent of those fancy infrared imaging cameras you see on nature documentaries.
Jack Snipe (or other birds) may prefer to remain hidden from normal view, with their cryptic patterning, crouching and remaining within vegetation; but they are warm little fellows, and can’t hide this from thermal imaging devices.
A couple of my friends now possess thermal imaging monoculars and it has opened up a new world for their birding. I told one of these newly equipped birders, Will, of a site where I had nearly trodden on a Jack Snipe, near Christmas-time. Jack Snipes can be very loyal to particular spots, and a few days later, the shining heat revealed it was back in the same spot, and watchable without the need to flush.
I joined Will a week or two later and, using the power of his ‘new toy’, we relocated almost certainly the same bird. It saw us, too, and was crouching rather than bouncing. But, surely it was a better way of surveying for cryptic birds than trampling though feeding habitat and flushing. It was amazing to see such a bird closer than I had ever seen a Jack Snipe, with every detail of the plumage revealed.
I probably won’t be getting a thermal imager, myself, (too expensive for one thing), but I acknowledge that the future’s bright, the future’s infrared.
A SILENT, HIDDEN REVOLUTION HAS BEEN GOING ON AROUND WET, REEDY MARGINS