Jack Snipe (Lymnocryptes minimus)

Much still remains to be discovered about the Jack Snipe, perhaps the most skulking and retiring of all the waders. It is difficult to see at all, and almost impossible to study. It is small, cryptically camouflaged, an inhabitant of thick cover, and most active in the half-light. When flushed it does not fly away in mad zigzags like a Snipe, but instead shifts reluctantly only at the point of being trodden upon, and then flops down again a few metres ahead, as if it were ill or injured. The Snipe calls in protest as it flies away; the Jack Snipe remains silent. It seems to try everything not to be detected.

Except for one thing. The Jack Snipe has a very odd habit, sometimes shared by other snipes (but never as much): when feeding, it rocks its body up and down by flexing its legs, making the whole body look as if it were on springs. At times this habit breaks the Jack Snipe’s cover, and the point of it is far from clear.

For breeding Jack Snipes visit marshes and bogs on the interface between tundra and taiga, often being found alongside Broad-billed Sandpipers. A typical nest site is on a moss-covered mound. Unusually for a wader the nest has something of a structure, being a loose cup of vegetation. From the sketchy observations so far, it appears that the female tends the chicks, but the Jack Snipe’s mating system is unknown.

Where Jack Snipes occur, a very strange sound can be heard at dawn and dusk in the breeding season. It sounds like the distant beating of horse’s hooves on a hard surface and its transmission is sometimes clear, sometimes muffled, at once near, then far away again. This is the Jack Snipe’s flight-song, uttered as the bird rises high, often to 60m, and plunges earthward once more. The flight path is wild, reckless and free, as if this skulker has finally been unleashed to be itself in the safety of night sky.