Jack Snipe

The presence of a Jack Snipe on the local nature reserve last week, once again highlighted the value of birdwatching a local patch. The finder, a colleague from work, visits the site on a regular basis throughout the year. Every now and then one of these visits turns up something unexpected or unusual, just reward for the amount of effort put in to watching the same site and its visiting birds on many occasions throughout the year.

Although the Jack Snipe is a smart little wader, it is rather secretive in its habits and rarely strays far from damp, well-vegetated cover. If you are fortunate enough to see one from a bird hide then you may well be treated to its furtive, crake-like feeding behaviour. The bird will tend to pick at food items on the surface, probing less often than its more familiar relative, and sometimes bobbing its body up and down like some peculiar clockwork toy. Your more typical view of a Jack Snipe is to see one launch itself from the piece of vegetation next to which you have just placed your foot. Once in the air, the Jack Snipe tends to stay rather low, flying in a straight line (Common Snipe zig-zags and gains height rapidly) before quickly dropping back down into suitable cover.

While the nature of its escape might suggest the Jack Snipe to be somewhat weak when it comes to flight, it is actually a long distance migrant, with some birds from the Siberian breeding population known to winter in sub-Saharan Africa. Others, from the western end of the breeding range, pass through Britain in the autumn, with some overwintering here. Arrivals here tend to begin in mid-September, increasing through October then dropping before the return movement in April.

The migratory nature of the species, coupled with its somewhat secretive habits and choice of feeding habitats, mean that we have a very poor understanding of this species. Of particular concern is the degree of uncertainty surrounding estimates of its population size. If we do not know how many Jack Snipe occur in Europe (or beyond) then how can we reliably determine if their populations are in difficulty, perhaps declining with the loss of favoured habitats to afforestation or land drainage.

While both Woodcock and Common Snipe are familiar birds to me, often seen on my ramblings around the Brecks, the Jack Snipe is a bird that I have seen only on a handful of occasions. I might just make a few more visits to the reserve over the coming week to see if I too can strike it lucky. Even if I don’t, there is always the chance that I might stumble across something else equally fascinating.

Hail the Woodcock pilot!

For two weekends on the trot I have been on the coast at first light to watch the arrival of migrating birds, picking out my first Bramblings and Fieldfares of the winter from many other newly arrived individuals. A persistent theme of both weekends has been the numbers of Goldcrests, arriving exhausted from their recent sea crossing and keen to feed up on small invertebrates gleaned from trees and shrubs.

Goldcrest, by Mike Toms

I am in awe of these tiny creatures. Weighing no more than 7g, they are one of the lightest birds to undertake regular sea crossings when on migration. This feat can be considered all the more remarkable by the fact that they carry little in the way of fat reserves and, with little fuel with which to make the journey, it is little wonder that they arrive exhausted. Equally remarkable, to my mind at least, is that these diminutive birds are able to survive long winter nights and low temperatures by burning up energy reserves that may see them lose a fifth of their body weight over a single night.

Our Goldcrests, those that I encounter in the forest throughout the summer months, are largely sedentary in habits. With the possible exception of those from more northerly parts of Britain, these individuals spend the winter here, with some moving into gardens to take advantage of the fat products that many householders now provide. Those from elsewhere in northern Europe, notably northern Scandinavia and Russia, move south or southwest in autumn and it is these birds that have been arriving along the Norfolk coast over the last few weeks.

Many are young birds, perhaps reflecting a good breeding season, but maybe also underlining their short lifespan and the high degree of turnover of individuals within the Goldcrest population. We handled a good number at one of our coastal ringing sites the other day and it was clear that some had just arrived, being of low weight and low fat score (we can score the amount of fat on a bird because the fat is carried in a pit on the chest and along the belly), while others had been in for a couple of days and had already fattened up.

The arrival of Goldcrests is now just about over, as is the case for many of our other winter visitors and passage migrants. The arrival of Goldcrests is often linked to the arrival of Woodcock and Short-eared Owls, something that might explain the folk name of ‘Woodcock pilot’ given to the Goldcrest. Among wildfowlers it is sometimes said that the Goldcrest hitches a ride in the plumage of migrating Woodcock, but it is similarity in the timing of their autumn movements that really underpins the association.

Woodcock displays parenting skills

There are some sights in the natural world that really do have to be seen to be believed. The other day, a wildlife photographer friend of mine told me of a recent encounter with a Woodcock. He had been out in one of his local woods searching for butterflies when he disturbed the bird. The Woodcock took flight and he was immediately struck by the fact that it was carrying something between its legs. As the bird dropped towards cover and released what it had been carrying, he could clearly see that it was a young chick. This was a behaviour that he had read about but, like me, never quite believed possible. Searching the ground from where the bird had taken off he soon found another chick, the parent obviously only able to carry one of her precious young at a time.

The Woodcock is a curious bird; a wader that is solitary in habits and which nests in a most unwader-like manner, selecting open woodland with some ground cover. These are familiar birds locally, with many pairs making use of the plantation woodland which grows on the sandy Breckland soils. Here they may be encountered at dusk during the early part of the breeding season, as the males follow regular circuits through the wood along which they indulge in a slow and distinctive display flight. The flight, known as ‘roding’ appears somewhere between that of an owl and an oversized bat.

Nesting Woodcock are extremely well camouflaged and not often encountered, the nest placed on the ground and often within a few feet of a tree, which provides some degree of shelter. The young are not born naked and helpless like songbirds but are covered with down and are well-advanced when they emerge from the egg. This means that they can soon leave the nest, following their mother and learning the skills needed to survive on their own. The few reports of Woodcock carrying young suggest that these birds will pick up chicks between their legs to move them away from an area that the parent considers unsafe. There are also one or two reports to suggest that a parent might also use this approach to carry chicks over a substantial obstacle, perhaps one blocking their route at ground level.

This does go to show that there is always something new to see when you spend time outside watching wildlife. If you put in the hours and take the trouble to really immerse yourself in the natural world then you may occasionally be rewarded by something truly amazing. It might not be a Woodcock carrying a chick but it could easily be something that is witnessed only rarely.

An unusual bird

The Woodcock must have dropped in close to the woodland feeding station where we had erected our nets, set on a regular basis throughout the winter to catch birds. Normally each visit yields a few dozen individuals, mostly tits and thrushes, some of which already carry individually numbered metal rings, fitted by licensed ringers operating at other sites. Our studies help researchers to both understand the movements made by birds and to establish variation in the survival rates over time. It is enjoyable and worthwhile work even if, as at this time of the year, it involves an early start on a particularly cold morning. While the work might seem routine, it is never dull and there is always something new to learn or see. Then there are those occasions where you catch something completely new, a bird that is exciting and unexpected.

So it was the other morning; rounding a corner by the main nets, there was a sudden, audible burst of wing beats as a Woodcock erupted from the ground, taking flight only to deposit itself in one of our nets. Each net is made of very fine material, virtually invisible to the bird, which is strung in such a way that the bird is held within a shelf-like pocket, untangled but sufficiently restrained so as not to effect an escape. There was our Woodcock, the first that I had seen in the hand; a beautifully marked reddish-brown bird, medium-sized and with an exceptionally long thin bill. Highly secretive in nature and largely nocturnal throughout the winter months, the Woodcock is a rather unusual bird. Although it belongs to a group of birds known as waders, the Woodcock isn’t exactly the sort of bird that you would see feeding on coastal mudflats or alongside saline lagoons. Instead, it is a bird of woodland, probing the soft ground for earthworms and living a predominantly solitary existence.

During the winter months, Woodcock can be found at night feeding in damp or marshy fields, close to the woodland to which they retreat at dawn. In summer, they switch to daytime feeding but remain, largely overlooked, within woodland. They seem to prefer open woodland, not too draughty, but with open rides and good stands of bracken. Looking at this particular bird, I could see how the beautifully marked plumage would provide fantastic camouflage when settled on the woodland floor. The bands of darker colour, set on a russet base, served to break up the outline of the bird and matched the range of colours that you would expect to see on a woodland floor. As it whirred away upon release, I felt incredibly privileged to have seen such a bird in the hand.

The Woodcock moon

It was bitterly cold the other morning as I drove the dogs out to the forest. Still dark, the headlights of the car picked out the distinctive squat shape of a woodcock settled in the middle of a quiet forest road. I brought the car to a gentle stop some twenty feet or so from the bird. Dazzled by the headlights, the woodcock remained motionless, affording me the opportunity to admire what is surely the most handsome of our wading birds. It’s head, back and wings are camouflaged by a mottle of browns and greys, while broken horizontal bars cross its paler chest. As I dipped the lights, the bird was up in the air and gone. This had not been my only view of this species over recent weeks. On other mornings I had seen the distinctive silhouette of a woodcock set against the dawn sky.

This highly secretive species is somewhat unusual for a wading bird. Active at night and most readily seen around dawn and dusk, it is adapted for a life predominantly spent within broad-leaved woodland. Here, in the south-western part of Norfolk, the woodcock can be found breeding and wintering in young conifer plantations, moving out into the surrounding pastureland to feed on earthworms and other soil-living invertebrates taken from the surface and top layers of the soil. The bird uses its long and highly sensitive bill to probe for prey.

Although the woodcock which breed here in summer are thought to be largely sedentary in their habits, birds from further north are migratory, with many thousands arriving to spend the winter here. Those birds that arrive in Norfolk from the second half of October will have come from Finland, Latvia and Russia. Such arrivals may continue into late December but go largely unnoticed because they arrive at night. Tradition has it that they all arrive together, some time around all hallows, following a change in the wind direction and close to a full moon. While it appears that a northerly or north-easterly wind is associated with the arrival of these winter visitors, there does not seem to be any evidence that the phase of the moon exerts an influence. However, such is the strength of this tradition that wildfowlers may refer to autumn full moons as ‘woodcock moons’. It is not just with the moon that the woodcock has been associated. The ease with which woodcock could be caught, typically by erecting nets at dawn or dusk across rides cut into a block of woodland, led to the notion that the species was rather stupid. This, in turn, led to the use of the term ‘woodcock’ as a synonym for slow-wittedness in a person – a harsh association for such a handsome bird.