It was a
rather windy and stormy day last Thursday. The night was starting to draw in
and the light was slowly fading. We weren’t far off heading home when a man knocked on the door of the closed
visitor centre. As he wondered in holding a large brown box I thought to myself, ‘what
on earth is in there?’ The gentleman began to explain how he had found this
bird wondering round the town centre. ‘On his way into specsavers’ he explained,
‘definitely not a pigeon’, ‘what could it be? In a town centre’ I wondered.
Gradually he tentatively
opened the lid of the cardboard box to reveal a beautiful mottled
brown bird, about the size of a bag of sugar, rather timid and its defining
feature, a disproportionately long beak. A snipe! In specsavers? It obviously
needed a couple of new pairs of glasses.
Apart from
being a little confused and un-phased by the three tall humans standing over
it, the snipe seemed in fair health. We made the decision to take it down to a
quiet part of the reserve to release it, close to the marshy area by the lake
which offers some particularly good feeding. Historically the marsh in Sandwell
Valley has always been excellent for wintering snipe, well into
double figures. Every year volunteers flush the snipe out of the marsh in order
to count the numbers, usually hard to spot feeding amongst the mud and long
vegetation.
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| Image by Andy Hay (rspb-images.org.uk) |
Once we made
it to the chosen release area, my colleague and I placed the box to the ground,
opened the lid and after a little
encouragement the snipe tottered out and headed carefully into the
undergrowth never to be seen again. Well we hope he/she has been seen again,
but they’re pretty hard to tell apart from one another! Miss/Master Snipe definitely
brightened a grey day in the office.
Jazz
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