How the eerie and mysterious snipe is holding its own in Scotland's hills

A snipe on Patrick Laurie's farm in Galloway | Patrick Laurie

Change has come to the Galloway Hills over the last 20 years. Even in the time that I’ve been farming in this place, the loss of birdlife has become devastatingly obvious. Huge amounts of new forestry put paid to our lapwings and ring ouzels, and then black grouse followed those declines in a few brief years.

For a long time, I thought that curlews would make for more reliable friends, but their numbers tumbled and there have been no breeding attempts on my land since 2020. New blocks of commercial planting and a dramatic intensification of grassland for dairy farms has done vast and potentially irreparable damage to the birdlife in this place, but there is a thread of continuity and a flicker of hope which shouldn’t be overlooked.

I never gave much thought to snipe in the old days. They lay at the bottom of a long list of what seemed to be more interesting birds, and they moved in unfathomable patterns dictated by seasons and weather conditions. Sudden ‘falls’ of snipe tumble down into Scotland under cover of darkness in October each year; the little waders breed like mice in the mossy moors of Iceland, and vast influxes of migrant birds come here to supplement those which breed across the UK.

Jinking flight

You can go to sleep in the blinking emptiness of stars and wake to find snipe behind every tussock of moorland grass. When the conditions seemed ripe, a few neighbours used to gather together and shoot three or four of these birds from mighty whisps of 80 or 90 which rose in a rush.

They were hotly sought after as birds for the table – they’re tiny when they’re plucked, but the meat is rich and dark, traditionally savoured as a treat across wetter, westerly places from Lewis to Connemara, Wigtownshire, Cornwall and Anglesey (where the snipe are sometimes said to lie thick as midges in the moss).

These massive seasonal movements of snipe are easy to overlook. The birds are fantastically well camouflaged, and their jinking flight is often hard to follow. You could easily walk past dozens of snipe without seeing a single feather, and it’s unusual for the birds to stay in one place for long.

They’re always hunting for mild weather, and nothing frightens snipe more than a sustained period of frost. That’s when they’re driven down onto the foreshore and the salty mudflats where they hope to find worms and easier living.

A rising, eldritch whoop

Signs of life return to Galloway during the last week of February. Skylarks start to sing again, and stonechats twitch and bicker on the bull-shed roof opposite my office window. These birds are a marker of progress towards spring, but snipe also play a part in the rising tide.

Their breeding displays include the famous “drumming” sound which is performed by male birds as they swoop down from the darkness in a rising, eldritch whoop. It’s a mechanical noise, quite unlike other birdsong because it’s caused by extending specially adapted tail feathers which buzz like the reeds in a harmonica.

As the dive gathers speed, the sound grows in intensity like a moan before rushing to a sudden, giddy conclusion. When a dozen snipe are displaying like this together, it makes for a devastatingly evocative backdrop to the first stars of evening and the bitter black horizon which runs across country to the Rhinns of Galloway and the shape of Kintyre and County Antrim beyond it.

I used to think I couldn’t live without the baleful whine of curlews or the arrogant bobble of black grouse displaying in the dusk. I’ve had to realise that I can live without these sounds, much as I wish I didn’t have to. But now that snipe are all I can hear on early spring nights, I realise that their drumming sound is more than just a consolation prize – it’s an entire atmosphere of its own.

Foxing the foxes

Snipe eggs are laid inside tussocks of moss so that they have a roof and four secure walls. They enter and leave through a tunnel of grass, and it follows that their nests are fairly safe from prying eyes. Bigger and more obvious birds like curlews and lapwings are in decline because their breeding attempts are so frequently overturned by predators like foxes and corbie crows.

On a rotten old post where the crows often gathered to share out their booty, I frequently found eggshell remnants from curlews, grouse and lapwings too. I never found any sign of snipe eggs there, and this seems to confirm scientific research which has shown that snipe are unusually effective at hiding their nests.

Research also suggests that snipe are the only moorland birds which don’t to respond to predator control undertaken by farmers and gamekeepers. Other species depend upon human help to manage crow and fox numbers, but snipe appear not to care whether this work is being done or not.

Home is a rough, soggy moor

Of course, there are pressures on wetlands and many good snipe habitats have been lost to afforestation and an intensification of agriculture (particularly in lowland England), but in their traditional strongholds, they are proving to be far more resilient than many other wader species.

Here in Galloway, snipe seem to love the rough, soggy moorland where my cattle graze throughout the year. I’d even say that their numbers are increasing, although they’re famously difficult birds to count.

We’re so used to worrying about wildlife that it’s useful to have a story of resilience and positivity to set against a wider sense of woe… and I am looking forward to the first drumming when it rings across the hills again in February. That’s how I’ll know there’s still life in the old place yet.

Patrick Laurie is a writer and farmer from Galloway. His book Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape was a Times Bestseller and was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing.