Jack Snipe – probably our most elusive and least understood bird.

Breeding in northern Eurasia, Jack Snipe are  winter visitors to the UK, being present mostly from September to April. They favour marshes, wet grasslands and the muddy fringes of reedbeds, but will also feed overnight in fields of short grass or stubble, taking various invertebrates.

An estimated 110,000 individuals winter across the UK, but due to their secretive and nocturnal nature this population estimate is deemed unreliable, and little is known about their habits and movements. However, with Natural England’s input and advancing technology, our understanding of them is changing.

From 2000 to 2015, on average less than 120 Jack Snipe were caught and ringed across the UK each year. With the advent of thermal imaging cameras, making detection of birds both during the day and night much easier, the annual average of birds ringed has since increased to over 420, with a record 738 in 2023. However, up to 2023, just 121 birds had been recovered and only 21 of those abroad. So, very little is known about their migration routes and choice of stopover sites.

In 2023/24, Natural England’s All Staff Ideas Fund paid for ten archival GPS tags that are accurate to ten metres to be fitted to Jack Snipe at two sites in the Midlands Heathland Heartland project area in south Staffordshire. The use of such tags on Jack Snipe had not been attempted before in the UK.

Working in partnership with the British Trust for Ornithology, Belvide Ringing Group, Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust and Sparsholt University Campus (University of Portsmouth), the aims of the project are to investigate winter foraging and day roosting behaviour, habitat use and migration strategies of Jack Snipe. By identifying important feeding, roosting and stopover sites, we hope to provide evidence to inform landscape scale conservation and nature recovery. 

Two birds were recaught at the same sites where they were tagged, six and 13 days after tagging. Both birds roosted each day at the same site, but they visited two or three different feeding areas, visiting the same field(s) for up to four nights in a row, before visiting another area and sometimes returning to a previous field on a later night. For the first time, this indicated that birds habitually returned to the same roosting and feeding sites, giving an insight into how birds wintering in the UK use their local landscape. 

In December 2024, we recaught another tagged bird, this time one that had migrated to its breeding grounds and returned to winter in Staffordshire. Unfortunately, the tag battery failed on the bird’s outward migration, but it did reveal for the first time the migration route of a UK Jack Snipe.

Having wintered in south Staffordshire, regularly roosting at the same wetland, it flew overnight in mid-April to a wetland in Essex. The next day it had flown to Germany and the day after that to Poland, having flown over 1,000km in three days. It stayed here for a further 15 days, rebuilding its energy reserves, before flying to another site in Poland and two locations in Latvia by the end of the next day, when the signal was lost. The bird was still migrating and would no doubt have continued north-eastwards into Russia.

This is not the end of the story though, as there are still other tagged birds out there. Furthermore, we have secured further funding through the Midlands Heathland Heartland project, West Midland Bird Club, Hampshire Ornithological Society and Sparsholt University Campus for another 40 tags. These include a brand-new design that will allow us to download data remotely rather than having to recatch the birds, which should provide us with even more information about their local and migratory movements and habitat requirements.

We hope to identify carrying capacity of wintering sites and undertake habitat assessments, which can be applied to other sites across the country and thereby potentially extrapolate a more accurate picture of the population and distribution of Jack Snipe in the country.

Kevin Clements

West Midlands Area Delivery Team