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African Snipe | Gallinago nigripennis
Afrikaanse snip | Agachadiza Africana
The African Snipe is the only snipe that breeds in southern Africa. It lives hidden in marshy vleis and marsh edges and draws attention mainly when it flushes zigzagging with a hoarse call, or in the breeding season through its display flight with the bleating sound of its tail feathers.
Voice
On flushing a hoarse, rasping chuk or scaap. In display flight the male dives at an angle, the spread outer tail feathers producing a vibrating, bleating hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo; this 'drumming' is heard both by day and at night. On the ground also a rhythmic chip-ee chip-ee.
Recording: Tony Archer — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
28–32 cm. A snipe with a very long, straight bill, about twice the length of the head. The head has a pale central crown stripe and broad pale supercilia between dark crown and eye stripes. The upperparts are dark with broad cream mantle stripes; neck and breast are warm brown and mottled, and the belly is clean white and sharply demarcated. The wings are strikingly dark, with almost no pale area below, and have a narrow white trailing edge. The tail shows much white on the outer feathers. The flight is fast and zigzagging.
Confusion species
Common Snipe Gallinago gallinago is very similar but has a slightly shorter bill, a broader white trailing edge to the wing and a paler, barred underwing; its outer tail feathers are narrower and browner. Great Snipe Gallinago media is stockier, with a barred belly, white wingbars and a silent, slow flight. Greater Painted-Snipe Rostratula benghalensis has a white eye-ring, a slightly drooping bill and broad, rounded wings.
Habitat
Marshy vleis, marsh edges with short, dense cover, wet grassland, montane seepage bogs and the reedy margins of dams. It forages by probing deep into soft mud. In Lesotho and the Drakensberg it reaches above 3000 metres.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Widespread but local in the east and south of the region: South Africa (especially the highveld, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern and Western Cape), Lesotho, Eswatini, Zimbabwe, the highlands of Mozambique and Malawi, Zambia, Angola, and in Botswana and northern Namibia mainly in the Okavango Delta and along the rivers. Absent from the dry western half. Beyond the region it occurs in the highlands of East Africa north to Ethiopia and in eastern Congo.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Walk slowly along a marshy vlei edge and wait for the hoarse call on take-off. In the breeding season, especially July to October, drumming over a vlei is the best way to confirm the species. In drought birds concentrate at the last wet spots, where they sometimes feed openly in the mud.
Conservation status
Not threatened. It has declined locally through drainage and conversion of vleis to farmland, overgrazing, and the building of dams that flood wet margins. Where vleis are protected, as in highveld and Drakensberg areas, the species is still fairly common.
Scientific name
Gallinago nigripennis | Bonaparte, 1839
Bonaparte described the species in 1839 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Gallinago was introduced in 1760 by Brisson. Gallinago is New Latin for a snipe, from Latin gallina 'hen' and the suffix -ago 'resembling'. nigripennis comes from the Latin niger, 'black', and penna, 'feather, wing' — for the dark wings and upperparts. The specimen the first description was based on came from Cape of Good Hope.