One of the most evocative sounds of this time of year is, for many of us, the drumming of a snipe. You hear it in many places, but some fishing friends remember it particularly on the water at Mount Dalton in Westmeath, neat, friendly lake with friendly people around. The drumming comes, apparently, from the vibration of tail feathers during a steep descent. A sound never forgotten.
The sound may also be likened to bleating and, for that reason, a Mayo friend used to say the bird is known as the gabhar aerach or aerial goat, or goat of the air. Dinneen doesn't have that, but he has gabhar oidhobe as a jack snipe.
Anyway, the French appear to take the snipe far more seriously than we do. By the time this appears, there will be a meeting of the International Club of Snipe Shooters. Now there's a title for you. They call it, actually, "chasseurs" or hunters of the snipe, but it's unlikely they go after the bird with anything but shot. This weekend will be the tenth anniversary celebrations of their founding, held in the area of St Nazaire.
Now you may say that the French think too much of shooting and eating game of one sort and other. But at least they do their best, through their various organisations, to see to it that the species continue to exist. This weekend the Club will give over the first day to an examination of studies done in the ten years of its existence, and to the state of the habitat. The second day is devoted to an excursion in boats through the marshes of Grande Briere, near to their meeting place of Pornichet la Baule. You would hardly expect that they try to breed snipe as others raise pheasants and hares and rabbits for hunting purposes. Or maybe they do. No, not possible. Anyway, they are serious students of nature.
Gone are the days, you presume, when one Captain Morgan could report that, in west Cork, he shot fifty snipe in three hours, or when Sir R Gore Booth, according to a responsible source, "killed to his own gun sixty five in a day and many times sixty." That was about the 1880s.
It is summer. No one shoots them. They make a never to be forgotten background to an evening on an Irish lake.