Guests take a break in our gardens

SOMETIMES odd birds turn up in people’s gardens.

One of the oddest examples is the reader in west Cork who tells me that, from time to time, a hen harrier sweeps over her garden wall and makes off with one of the collared doves at her feeding station.

The name ‘hen harrier’ suggests that at one time this handsome bird of prey may have been a scourge of domestic poultry. But nowadays they are so rare, so timid and so restricted to wilderness areas that this could win the prize for most unlikely garden bird.

But a couple of days ago an email from a reader threw up another contender for the prize. It seems this man lives in a fairly ordinary house in a suburb of Cork city and was puzzled by a bird with a long beak he didn’t recognise that appeared to have taken up residence in his garden. He sent me a photo he’d taken through the window and when I got it I realised that he had a snipe sitting on his front lawn.

Snipe (inset) and woodcock are classed as wading birds but, unlike most waders, they don’t probe mud flats for food or run up and down beaches. Snipe roost during the day in heather bogs or damp rushy fields and woodcock, as you might expect, roost in woods. They prefer shrubby woods with a dense under-storey of bracken or brambles and in parts of the country where woodland is scarce they’ll make do with thickets of mature furze. Both species fly off at dusk to spend the night feeding in nearby pasture fields.

They feed by using their long, straight beaks to probe the ground in search of invertebrates. Woodcock have a particular habit of probing cow pats in search of the insect larvae than often live beneath them. If you find a cow pat full of holes, as if a pencil had been pushed through it several times, it’s a sure sign that a woodcock was feeding there the night before.

Both species breed in Ireland, but in small and diminishing numbers. I live in a boggy part of the world and 25 years ago the drumming of snipe was a regular sound in late spring and early summer. This extraordinary noise is rather like the bleat of a mad goat — in fact ‘goat bird’ is a common country name for the snipe. It’s part of the male bird’s mating display and is not produced by its vocal chords but by its tail feathers as it makes a fast, vertical dive. Unfortunately I haven’t heard it for many years.

The stronghold for woodcock is the boreal forest of northern Scandinavia and western Russia and most snipe breed a little further north in the boggy tundra. Large numbers of both species visit Ireland in winter.

Most summer migrant birds fly from one destination to another and then stop. But many winter migrants, including snipe and woodcock, undertake a more restless journey, moving on every few weeks in search of pastures new. They can end up travelling huge distances. During the northern winter I have met woodcock in the Canary Islands and snipe in Ethiopia.They fly mainly at night and prefer a full moon. But sometimes they meet difficult weather conditions such as cross-winds or head-winds and they become exhausted and have to land to feed and recuperate.

My guess is that the snipe in the suburban garden was such a bird. It was en route to its arctic breeding grounds and had become tired, hungry and disorientated. In the moonlight it glimpsed a patch of grass below and decided it was time for a short break in its journey north.

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