We often have to be spontaneous at this time of year, ready to leap into action at a moments notice to carry out survey work. The surveys are all weather dependent and so when it looked like it was going to be windless and even potentially sunny yesterday evening, we decided it was a wise idea to stay late and do a snipe survey.
Snipe are one of the star birds on Otmoor and we represent the only site in central England where they breed. They can be very tricky birds to find due to their cryptic camouflage, but luckily at this time of year the males bring lots of attention to themselves by making a distinctive ‘drumming’ noise. They fan out special stiff tail feathers and dive out of the sky allowing these feathers to vibrate and drum as they fall. Very impressive.
So on our surveys we count the number of drumming male snipe, which in turn gives us an idea of the size of the breeding population.
We picked an ideal evening. After a hard days work, trudging round a field for a few hours can seem quite onerous, but the wildlife and an incredible cloud formation soon put pay to any grumbling. Not only did we have good numbers of snipe drumming, but there were also loads of swifts screaming overhead, a turtle dove purring by the volunteers hut, a common tern fishing over one of the Greenaways scrapes, curlew, redshank and lapwing calling, hobbies catching insects over the ditches, lots of reed buntings, skylarks and meadow pipits bursting out of the grass and a female marsh harrier hunting over the reedbed.
We need to finish analysing our figures, but the snipe seem to be doing well on the reserve and so it looks like all the management we do for them in terms of getting the water levels right, making sure they have suitable long vegetation to nest in, making sure there is soft mud they can probe their bills into to feed and keeping cattle out of the areas they’re nesting in until later in the year, is working well.
Photo 1.) Drumming snipe (taken by Roger Wyatt)
Photo 2.) Hobby on Greenaways