Climate Change? It Means More Snipe

Two decades after the first hair-raising squeak of the snipe on the Galloway hills, Patrick Laurie is still flummoxed by the feisty birds

I shot my first snipe on my family’s hill farm in 1999. We had been walking-up grouse and as we were returning for lunch, a bird rose up from the rushes at my feet. Supervised by my father and shooting with my grandmother’s 28-bore, I spun that snipe into the grass with a lucky second barrel.

It was a crowning moment of excitement and the unfortunate bird went into the bag alongside two brace of grouse, a hare and three rabbits. Those wild, mixed days were the foundation of my sporting life and I have always thought that snipe ranked far beyond their stature as birds of beauty and delight.

Twenty years later, I am still thrilled by the crazy, hair-raising squeak of a snipe in the wind. We shoot a handful every year but only after the September full moon, when the birds begin to pour in from Scandinavia and Iceland.

These are well-grown, feisty birds with the power to flummox even the most stolid and determined Shot — I hate to imagine what the ratio must be between shots fired and birds bagged.

Unlike almost every wading bird in Scotland, snipe numbers have held steady in these hills. The spring is filled with a whirring cacophony of drumming birds and they transform the bitter cold of early spring into a fantasy land of expectation. On this ground and elsewhere, I have worked hard to find a regime of grazing to support the breeding grounds these little birds adore.

Abundant

The snipe seem to have a changing climate on their side. Wetter winters and a steadily decaying agricultural drainage system have helped many of the old hay meadows and in-bye pasture to revert to deep rushes. While much of this ground is now too thick and sour for the lapwing that used to crowd these fields, snipe have stepped in to fill the gap. I don’t think there has ever been a time when the little birds have been so abundant.