Flying visits from the jack snipes

Another Life: Before winter fought back from the limbo of global warming, the west coast had a run of exquisite days that gleamed like an abalone shell, all nacreous pinks and blues. With the fog and the north wind safely tucked behind the hill, I climbed our sunny side of it - not the big mountain, that is, just the foothill ridge that fills our kitchen window: an hour up and half-an-hour down.

Some of that time went in picking my steps up an old right-of-way to the commonage (not for walkers, but driving sheep and cattle). Long disused, it is all pits, rocks and hummocks, and holes full of black water, and beyond it a mountain fence threatens a rusty castration.

I don't know why I chose that route, except not to worry my neighbour's ewes (they squat if I surprise them, peeing in a bright cloud of steam).

But the higher reaches of the pastures are all, in any case, greatly broken land, a palimpsest of sunken walls and banks with the odd stone foundation of a cabin. This is the old, pre-Famine fabric of the once-crowded hillside, now clotted with thigh-deep clumps of rushes and moorgrass.

The slope beyond the final fence is, by contrast, almost entirely bare: blond and whiskery with mat-grass and sedges and furrowed with rocky ravines. These carry the streams from the wetland cradled below the ridge: a shallow bog in which I invariably lose my bearings, leaping uneasily among the streamlets edged in bright-green moss.

In all, the land above the fences makes bleak and nondescript rambling: even wildlife, one would think, must shun a slope so pounded by the sea wind and leached of nourishment. Why, then, bother to trudge up there? For the wide, shining circle of the view, from Achill and Croagh Patrick to Mweelrea and Connemara; for the islands, for the silence, for the good of my soul.

A solitary stonechat kept me company up the right-of-way, deserting its fence-posts for boulders along the stream and searching for insects to carry it on through the winter. But what halted me with one leg over the wire was the sight of a stoat on the open hill beyond, travelling purposefully downwards into the shadow of the mountain fence. What, in that scantily covered terrain, could it have been hunting? Further up, at the stubbles of the wetland, an answer suggested itself - or rather exploded from under my feet. All snipe get up in this dramatic way, but the little Continental jack snipe, Lymnocryptes minimus, leaves its escape until touched by the shadow of one's descending boot. Did I know it for what it was? Not at all: I thought, that seems small for a snipe - could it be . . .? And then two birds of proper size ("full" or "whole" snipe, as shooters called them) rocketed up to show the difference.

The full, common snipe carries, proportionately, the longest bill of any Irish bird, often probing a full finger's depth into mud or soft peat to see what it can feel that might be edible (earthworms are dragged out and beaten to death before being swallowed whole). Snipe, in turn, have been eaten for centuries - caught by snaring even before there were guns and their couple of ounces of meat almost ranking with the plumper woodcock. (Escoffier, considering snipe in succession to black-caps and garden warblers, says the bird should "after being plucked, look like a white ball of fat".) As big a satisfaction must, I suppose, lie in the shooter's marksmanship.

In the most recent bag figures listed by the gun clubs (for the winter before last), there were 4,388 snipe and 623 jack snipe, an infinitesimal share of the 20-30 million snipe thought to arrive in western Europe for the winter from their northern breeding grounds.

Ireland's jack snipe are all winter migrants - perhaps 30,000 of them, dispersed across marshes and bogland. In Leinster, a good place not to tread on them is Carriggower Bog in Co Wicklow (this from the recent big BirdWatch Ireland report on our wetland birds).

Few birds are so vulnerable to icy weather that freezes the ground hard, though snipe will eat seeds when they have to. Once, in a snowy winter, a neighbour brought us a snipe that had crashed through the slightly-open window of his parked car: it lay on the back seat with a broken leg. I splinted it with matchsticks and adhesive tape and settled it on hay in a beachcombed milk-crate.

It spurned sesame seeds (nice and oily, we thought) but pecked eagerly at those in the hay. It lodged with us for several days, standing on its good leg much of the time, silent and watchful except at evening, when it grew restless. We let it take its chances as the weather warmed up again; it wavered away into the dusk.