Wilson's Snipe | A master of disguise

This morning i ended up sleeping in and not going shooting icebergs with Brad as i had planed on doing, but around 7:45am when i received a phone call from Brad saying he was photographing a Wilson's Snipe right next to my house i jumped out of bed and rushed down to the marsh!

Sure enough there it was, my arch nemesis bird. For quite some time we both have been trying to get some nice shots of a snipe calling from a perch but from what we have seen it appears the snipe will only call from a perch in the early morning usually in May & June. This is when they are claiming nesting territory and finding mates. Even though we didn't get the bird on a perch we were both happy with the images we came away with. Snipe are extremely secretive and usually the only time you get to seem them is when they flush up in your face as your walking through a wetland.

In the following weeks we are going to continue our efforts in getting an image of a snipe calling from a nice perch. This morning the first Tree Swallows of the season have been reported! I can't wait until they begin to nest in our boxes for another consecutive season. This afternoon my dad and i will continue to build more boxes. We encourage you to build a box yourself and place it in your yard. Swallows take readily to next boxes and are amazing to watch in your yard not to mention they eat flies! 

                                                        If you look closely you can see the Snipe's tongue

Wilson's Snipe calling

How you usually see snipe 

Below is a s photo of the stump we have placed in a local wetland for the snipe to call on. By doing this we hope to get a unique image in the sense that most images of snipe are of them calling from a fence post rather then natural logs or sticks