{"id":145066,"date":"2023-10-20T06:27:55","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T12:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=145066"},"modified":"2023-10-20T12:35:37","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T18:35:37","slug":"my-morning-with-wilsons-snipes-more-photos-and-more-of-the-details","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/20\/my-morning-with-wilsons-snipes-more-photos-and-more-of-the-details\/","title":{"rendered":"My Morning With Wilson’s Snipes – More Photos And More Of The Details"},"content":{"rendered":"

Snipes galore.<\/p>\n

Two days ago as I was driving by, I saw a small group of Wilson’s Snipes land in the tall grass near some water so I turned around to see if I could get them in my viewfinder. As I slowly inched forward I knew where they were but I couldn’t see them, until they started flying off in groups of two or three.<\/p>\n

I hate flushing birds so I just stopped and waited, hoping that any snipes that were left would eventually show themselves.<\/p>\n

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It took at least five minutes but finally, a single snipe popped its head up out of the grass.<\/p>\n

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Eventually, others started coming out into the open. This guy, one of the first, kept a pretty close eye on me for a while but soon they all went about their business as if I wasn’t there.<\/p>\n

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Snipes use their long bills to probe in mud, on land or in shallow water, for their food. Typically they eat larval insects, crustaceans, earthworms and mollusks but as much as 66% of the material found in their stomachs is plant material.<\/p>\n

Inexplicably, Cornell’s Birds of the World says that they probably get “little or no energy” from the plants they eat. Doesn’t quite make sense to me…<\/p>\n

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This time this bird came up empty, or it ate something tiny before its bill came out of the water.<\/p>\n

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By now, dozens of snipes had come out of the grass and started doing all the things that snipes do, including preening. Here we see a little rhynchokinesis at the tip of its bill.<\/p>\n

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At first I was pretty excited to get more than one snipe in the frame at the same time, even though I didn’t have enough depth of field to get them all sharp. In my experience with snipes in the past, they’re usually fairly solitary birds or they’re found in very small groups so it had been out of the ordinary for me to get several of them in the same frame.<\/p>\n

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This one preened right in front of me for a long time so I got lots of photos. This is one of my favorites, even though there isn’t a catch light in its eye.<\/p>\n

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When the same bird roused at the end of its preening session, its individual feathers were exceptionally well defined.<\/p>\n

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By now I’d been with the snipes for 39 minutes and during that time small groups of them had been flying off and replaced by other groups that flew in and landed amongst the others. But far more birds were flying in than flying off so the entire area was becoming thick with snipes.<\/p>\n

As a result, it was becoming more and more difficult for me to get photos of individual snipes that weren’t photobombed by other snipes.<\/p>\n

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Another snipe that insisted on showing me ‘his’ preening technique up close. He worked on that one isolated feather, the one he’s grasping with the tip of his bill, for a long time.<\/p>\n

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This was the only time I could see what a snipe was eating.<\/p>\n

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To me it looks like it might be a mollusk (slug?). At first I thought it might be an annelid (leech?) but I can’t make out any segments, although leech segments can be hard to see. All I can tell for sure is that it’s an invertebrate. Any thoughts?<\/p>\n

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This is what the entire 75′ section of shoreline was beginning to look like. It was crawling with snipes, including an unknown number of them hidden in the taller grasses a little further away from the water. More birds continued to fly in and land than flew away.<\/p>\n

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And they came in in flocks ranging from about a half dozen birds to roughly 50 of them. Here we see 22 snipes in flight but there were quite a few more out of frame.<\/p>\n

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Typically the flocks would fly right over my head, presumably to make sure it would be safe to land, and then they’d circle around and join the other snipes on the ground. Occasionally, a flock would decide against landing and fly away. To where, I don’t know.<\/p>\n

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I tried repeatedly to get landing shots but the conditions for getting good ones were very difficult.<\/p>\n

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When a group of snipes would land, they repeatedly formed nearly circular groups of birds facing each other. They interacted with each other in ways I don’t understand. I never saw them fight and I couldn’t hear them calling to each other (although they may have been, softly) but their body language made it obvious that they were interacting with each other in ways that were mysterious to me.<\/p>\n

Whenever they formed these nearly circular groups I thought of them as “conventions” of snipes. The only thing missing was name tags.<\/p>\n

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Another snipe flying in to join the “convention”.<\/p>\n

I could continue but this post is getting too long.<\/p>\n

I spent over an hour with these birds and I had them all to myself for the entire time. I probably spent too much time trying to count, or estimate, how many snipes were surrounding me in three dimensions. It was tricky because there were the snipes I could see near the shore, snipes hidden in the grass and often others in flight overhead. But eventually I arrived at a conservative estimate of at least<\/span> <\/em>200 snipes. There may have been significantly more.<\/p>\n

As you can imagine, I had the time of my life.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Notes:<\/em><\/p>\n