Jack snipe

Voice

Almost always silent when flushed, and that silence is itself diagnostic; at most a weak, muffled gatch escapes it. On the breeding grounds it is anything but quiet: on May and June nights a rhythmic, hollow galloping lok-lok, lok-lok, lok-lok carries across the bog, like a horse cantering on a hard road in the distance, audible for kilometres. You will practically never hear that sound in the Netherlands or Spain. A flushed bird sometimes gives away nothing but the soft flutter of its wings.

Identification

Distinctly smaller than Common Snipe and with a notably short bill, hardly longer than the head. The crown is dark and has no pale central stripe; instead a split, double supercilium runs above the eye, which at close range is the clinching feature. Four sharp golden-yellow lines run down the mantle, and the scapulars gloss purple and green in good light. The flanks are streaked lengthways, not barred as in Common Snipe, and the pointed, wedge-shaped tail has no white. Feeding birds bounce constantly up and down as if mounted on a spring; that bobbing betrays it more often than its plumage does.

Confusion species

Common Snipe is the only serious confusion: larger, with a far longer bill, a pale central crown stripe, barred flanks and a white trailing edge to the wing, and it towers away in wide zigzags giving a harsh scaap. Woodcock is much bigger and heavier, with transverse crown bars and a woodland character. Great Snipe is larger, with white tail corners and heavier flank barring, but is a vagrant in the Netherlands and Spain.

Habitat

Waterlogged sedge and rush, wet sphagnum fringes, seepage ditches, flooded corners of meadows, quaking fen and the muddy, cattle-trampled edges of pools. It wants cover a few decimetres high: too bare and it will not settle, too rank and it cannot reach the ground. It feeds by probing the soft mud with its short bill, on worms, insect larvae and seeds. On the breeding grounds it uses open raised bog and sedge mire in the taiga zone.

Range and movements

Breeds in northern Scandinavia and across the Russian taiga and winters in western Europe, the Mediterranean and the Sahel. The Netherlands probably holds a few thousand birds in winter, spread over wet reserves and farmland, but almost every record is of a bird flushed. In Spain it is a thinly spread winter visitor to rice fields, wet dehesa hollows, marismas and reservoir margins, with most reports from Doñana, Extremadura and the Ebro delta.

• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• Migration direction
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

Between November and February walk slowly and in zigzags through a soggy sedge corner or along a seepage ditch with a hummock-and-hollow structure, and watch for any bird that lifts low and without a sound. Mark where it lands: Jack Snipe usually drop in again within twenty to fifty metres and will then often let you watch them on the ground, sometimes down to ten metres. Frost concentrates them on unfrozen seepages and ditch edges, and those are the best days. Try the morning, while the grass is still wet and the birds sit close to the open margins.

Conservation status

Least Concern, with a large but thinly occupied breeding range in the northern taiga. The European trend is hard to establish because the species barely lets itself be counted: breeding numbers are estimated from displaying males at night and winter numbers are never more than an estimate. The concerns are drainage and reclamation of peat mires on the breeding grounds, the loss of wet, rough margins in the wintering range, and hunting, which is still practised in several European countries.