Snipe Island

This reminds me of the cover shot for one of those annoying Sunday supplement articles in which various people's publicists have managed to convince the writer that they're some kind of up-and-coming Thing. Perhaps I should have called it Ten Snipe to Watch in 2025.

I was planning a trip to the Somerset Levels today, but the thick murky cloud belied the weather forecast, and I didn't fancy making a two-hour drive on the off chance of conditions being better further south, so I compromised and went to Slimbridge - about half way to the Levels - where it turned out that the light was just as bad as it was at home. I'd barely set foot on the reserve when I bumped into a birding friend (the first of several I twitched in and around various hides), who told me that I'd probably have had a worse time in Somerset, because parts of Ham Wall and Westhay are closed due to flooding. When I'm in charge of things the RSPB will advertise information like this prominently on the web sites of their reserves, but given that they currently don't I was just glad that I'd made the right judgement call today.

I've havered over these two images, not least because I've already seen several near-identical versions of the main photo on my socials: between the birding friends I saw around the reserve, and the ones I didn't spot at the time but found out later had been there too, it seems as though half the people I know spent at least part of today watching Snipe on the Rushy. But R likes it, which is a good enough reason in itself for posting it; and I quite like it too - though it suffers from the inevitable problem of group photos, which is that you never seem to be able to find a frame in which everyone is looking in approximately the right direction, and nobody is either scratching themselves or picking their nose.

I've seen estimates of anything up to thirty five Snipe being present on the Rushy today, though the Slimbridge morning count listed a far more conservative fifteen individuals. Whatever the true count, it's certainly the largest number I've ever personally seen there, and the birds were presenting themselves unusually well. Snipe are present all the year round at Slimbridge, and probably breed there, but these may well be winter immigrants. The RSPB estimates that we have around 800 breeding pairs in the UK, but many of these head south into Europe for the winter, while we receive a much bigger influx from northern Europe, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. These wintering birds - estimated at a million individuals - move south to our shores between September and November, and return to their breeding grounds between March and May.

My second photo shows one of the Longhorn cattle that are currently grazing Top New Piece, closely attended by two Cattle Egrets. These small herons have the habit of following grazing livestock, and sometimes farm vehicles, in order to feed on the grassland insects they disturb - though they will also catch and eat worms, frogs, toads, tadpoles and (the famous) small fish. They're the smallest heron we have in the UK, being a couple of inches shorter than a Little Egret due to a more compact build, and having a correspondingly narrower wingspan. The RSPB doesn't list the Cattle Egret as a resident species, despite there being records of it breeding here, but it's being seen in increasing numbers in southern England as the European population expands, and the British Trust for Ornithology describes it as a recent colonist.

R: C6, D5.