A wisp of Snipe
I flushed a small group of Snipe that were in a flooded sheep pasture not far from my house. I'm sure they had recently arrived, probably from Scandinavia. They flew up twisting with the sound of tearing cloth, but circled round giving me just one shot, and this is it. As a breeding bird Snipe has really collapsed, largely as a result of drainage of marshy land. In the lowlands, surveys in England and Wales showed a 62% decline between 1982 and 2002, though numbers have held up better in upland areas. According to BTO the winter population has also declined between 25-50% and the winter range has contracted.
I called the photo a wisp of Snipe, though wisp is another of those old collective nouns that are only used in quizzes and can rarely have been used. Such collective nouns were supposedly used by shooters who wanted to communicate to friends without giving the game away to outsiders. That is how rhyming slang and palare (or polari) came about too. So back to shooting, believe it or not Snipe can still be shot from October 1st to January 31st, though their twisting flight means that only the most skilled marksmen can shoot them. Now I have heard it said that this is where the term Sniper comes from, though it now means someone who shoots from a concealed position. Apparently the verb sniping was first used in 18th century India by British soldiers for the act of going Snipe shooting, and Sniper was a person who went shooting Snipe. But in a military context, soldiers who were good with a rifle at this time were referred to as sharpshooters or marksmen, but not snipers. Sniper in its current use as a concealed marksman seems to have first been used during the First World War.
A wisp of Snipe
I flushed a small group of Snipe that were in a flooded sheep pasture not far from my house. I'm sure they had recently arrived, probably from Scandinavia. They flew up twisting with the sound of tearing cloth, but circled round giving me just one shot, and this is it. As a breeding bird Snipe has really collapsed, largely as a result of drainage of marshy land. In the lowlands, surveys in England and Wales showed a 62% decline between 1982 and 2002, though numbers have held up better in upland areas. According to BTO the winter population has also declined between 25-50% and the winter range has contracted.
I called the photo a wisp of Snipe, though wisp is another of those old collective nouns that are only used in quizzes and can rarely have been used. Such collective nouns were supposedly used by shooters who wanted to communicate to friends without giving the game away to outsiders. That is how rhyming slang and palare (or polari) came about too. So back to shooting, believe it or not Snipe can still be shot from October 1st to January 31st, though their twisting flight means that only the most skilled marksmen can shoot them. Now I have heard it said that this is where the term Sniper comes from, though it now means someone who shoots from a concealed position. Apparently the verb sniping was first used in 18th century India by British soldiers for the act of going Snipe shooting, and Sniper was a person who went shooting Snipe. But in a military context, soldiers who were good with a rifle at this time were referred to as sharpshooters or marksmen, but not snipers. Sniper in its current use as a concealed marksman seems to have first been used during the First World War.