Now that we’ve gotten the snow out of the way, spring is progressing rather nicely with lots of birds migrating through the area. With all the snow that we’ve received this winter as well as areas to our north, there is plenty of flooding occurring along the Mississippi River and tributaries. This in turn, has flooded many of the fields in the area and has become a haven for ducks, geese and other birds that like to feed in flooded grasses such as snipes and rusty blackbirds.
I had an interesting encounter with a rusty blackbird that was flipping over water-logged leaves in search of food. Below is a short video clip showing this behavior:
In the same flooded field, there were many Common Snipe foraging, preening and sleeping. Snipe are amazing at the art of camouflage. I would stare at the puddles of water and dried grass for minutes at a time and eventually when one of them moved, you could see them.
BYW, the origins of the word “sniper” according to Wikipedia comes from the verb “to snipe” which originated in the 1770s among soldiers in British India, which would hunt snipe. It was extremely challenging for hunters. I wonder if they actually ate them or was it just for fun? I can’t imagine them tasting very good but if you were hungry enough, I guess anything including shoe leather would be tasty.
⏤Alan Stankevitz