Like a will-o’-the-wisp

As the temperatures drop off, Patrick Laurie finds himself inexorably drawn to the hills to find that elusive Icelandic invader, the snipe

2022-11-02 -

There’s a website which records every twist and turn of the wind. It displays its findings on an interactive map, and you can scroll back and forth across the entirety of Europe to see what weather happened where and when. The patterns generated by this website are strangely mesmerising, and it’s also nice to remember that they are harmless.

You can only see where the wind has already been and gone, so there’s nothing like a forecast to consider.

You don’t have to pin your hopes to the arrival of high pressure or pray for the likelihood of a cool southwesterly. You’re simply watching the way the world has worked, and that’s a fascinating distraction.

The weather sharpens in October, and a bright moon sets the wild birds moving. From where I lie in bed at night, I can hear pink-footed geese arriving on the Solway under cover of darkness; there are whooper swans in heavy chains above the farm and crazy gangs of teal in the dawn. And there are certain winds which encourage this mass movement of birds; winds which reappear like a pattern at this time of year.

If you tune into that recording website, you can see the arrows scrolling off the southern shores of Iceland. The little arrows churn and swirl, and then they rush in a torrent towards Scotland’s west coast; to Ireland, Wales and Brittany. That is where this website is more than merely navel gazing. If those winds coincide with a clear moon, you can be certain that snipe are coming to fall.

Great flocks

Scientists say that most of our winter snipe come from Iceland, and all evidence suggests that the birds are doing fine in the Land of Fire and Ice. As summer dies, it’s no surprise that they are keen to exchange the frozen waste of the far north for a sloppier, muddier kind of winter. It seems as if they gather on the Icelandic coast

until the winds are right, then make the journey down in great flocks which are hard to imagine when you’re only used to seeing them singly or in pairs on a shoot day.

I was taught to call these flocks ‘wisps’, but I’ve never been completely happy with the meaning of this word. It seems to offer a collective noun for snipe (like a flock of sheep, or a murder of crows), but I think the issue is more complicated than that. When geese are on the ground they’re a gaggle, but in flight they’re a skein. And to me, a skein is specifically a line of geese flying in a row, like pinkfeet and greylags do.

But barnacle geese fly in a noisy, yapping mess which you could hardly call the same. It doesn’t feel right to describe barnacles in a skein, so perhaps the word is more complicated than it seems? By the time you’ve made up your mind, the chances are that they’ve landed and become a gaggle anyway.

It sounds like I’m being picky here, but shooting vocabulary is famously pedantic. It’s for that reason that I’m dissatisfied by the idea that ‘wisp’ applies to any situation where several snipe have gathered. When they’re flying on that tough migration south from Iceland, they’re often in tight, fast-moving formations of

“Most snipe flush as singletons with a cry of panic or defiance”

30 or 40 birds. I sometimes see them arriving like this on the

Solway, but this behaviour is so unlike what you’d expect from a snipe that it’s actually difficult to recognise them. Are these birds a wisp? Or instead is a wisp when, later in the year when the moon and good feeding conditions have concentrated the birds into one area, they flush in dribs and drabs? It seems impossible that one word should cover two very different scenarios, so which wisp is which?

In reality, most snipe that shooting folk find each year will flush from cover as singletons with a noisy cry of panic or defiance. Second or third birds might flush if they’re nearby and gunshots are heard, but it’s unusual to find large numbers of the birds flushing all at once. That is unless you’re watching the wind on the internet, and following the cycle of the moon.

Promising

This year, a fall of snipe landed with me like an explosion of TNT. There was one clear night with a good moon, and I checked the internet at 5am the following morning for

an indication of where the wind had been. It looked very promising, but it was a Tuesday. Only one friend was available to shoot, and he was only around until lunchtime. But I had work from 9am, and our plans fell apart even as I checked my phone and walked down below the house to give the dogs a run in the darkness.

Snipe were everywhere. In the first glow of the new day, I saw several good formations of them flying east towards Dumfries and the Nith valley. I could hardly walk more than a few feet in any direction without hearing that wet, grumpy little sound of a snipe calling from a flush. As dawn came on, more birds rose before the dogs, who by this point were beginning to foam over with excitement. They were only distracted when the younger labrador followed her nose right on to a beautiful red fox who had been lying up in the rushes.

The two of them cannonballed away over the horizon, and the dog returned looking rather sheepish a few minutes later. My labradors hate foxes, and both are faster than your average fox in a headto-head sprint. But neither have anything like a killer instinct, and they’re more likely to run alongside a fox barking at it than cause it any bother.

Extraordinary birds

Fearing that I would miss the boat on a mother lode of snipe, I called a trusty Shooting Times photographer and arranged for a walk in the evening, shortly before dusk. We took to the hill on a day which had brightened into beautiful clarity as the hours had passed. Wet pools of moss and rushes splashed underfoot, and the ditches rang with a chirpy gurgle of running water.

I’m not a madly enthusiastic shooter of snipe. They’re extraordinary birds and I would be sorry if I never shot another one, but my enthusiasm for the bag has certainly mellowed over the past 10 years. I find it’s just as satisfying to work them out and understand their movements as it is to perform a successful shot and bring a bird into my hand. But there is something about a trip to shoot snipe in October which chimes very nicely with the changing seasons, just as August would not be the same without an attempt at the grouse. So as people begin to carve pumpkins and remark upon the beautiful autumn leaves, the season is somehow incomplete without that sudden downdraught from Iceland,

the rush of flight in the

dawn and the splash of wellies in the bog.

Snipe shooting has become controversial recently, and many people campaign to see it banned. I don’t think there’s cause for this, but it does pay to place a greater emphasis on quality over quantity. Plus, disbelieving critics can never believe that snipe make for worthwhile eating — that’s an extraordinary pleasure they’ll never know.

Returning to the wet fields and the rushy pastures after five hours of daylight, the land felt oddly different.

Unlike the marginal land which I’d walked before dawn, this was some good snipe country, crisscrossed with drains and low hedges — but there were no snipe to be found. Only one flushed far ahead of me, long beyond the range of my 12-bore. After a 20-minute traipse through the wet grass, I dropped even further down to similarly wet fields where water lies all year round. I flushed three birds in quick succession. I took a shot at the last one, but my chances are always slim on a bird that’s quartering away and has already started to jink.

Silence

After this, silence reigned. A hare rose up and ran ahead of the dog, and thrushes poured out from the hedges. But all the morning’s tumult seemed to have magically vanished, and whatever strange eddy of the wind which brought these birds to

“Only one flushed far ahead of me, long beyond the range of my 12-bore”

the hill had also took them out of it. Splashes of white droppings showed where the birds had been, and some of the nearby cowpats had been keenly riddled by hungry beaks, but beyond these few small traces, there was nothing.

Looking at the wind website later, I saw the southern breeze had shifted into the west. Perhaps the snipe I’d seen took enough momentum from that to leave Galloway and flop a little further south. It wasn’t the first time I’ve missed out on a decent day, and it won’t be the last.