Sniped! by Leath Tonino

SNIPED!

REVERIES FROM AN AURAL EXPLORER.

By Leath Tonino

It’s an uptwirling whistle. No, it’s a fluting double helix. Sorry, try again. According to one naturalist, it’s a “whoop, whoop, whoop” reminiscent of Curly’s famous riff in the Three Stooges. Or is it a low pulsing, a fluttering buzz, a “bewildering, wavering sound that drifts from everywhere and yet nowhere”? Technically, it’s winnowing, a term that designates both the Wilson’s snipe’s flight display (high circles, shallow dives, so damn sexy to a prospective mate, so damn intimidating to a territorial intruder) and the sonic something produced by that behavior. Hmm, but that doesn’t convey the power, the wonder. Some say “ghostly, a haunting hu-hu-hu.” I say there’s nothing remotely spooky going on here; in fact, rarely am I as calmly, quietly, gladly at home as when I’ve tuned myself to the snipe.

Let’s rewind and describe the experience of this spring serenade. Third week of April, 6:30 p.m. I ditch my bike by the Gronk, wander the willows, plop down beside Peanut Lake, crack a beer, take a pull, and for once in my blathering life shut up and actually listen. Canada geese honk and splash. Red-winged blackbirds sing their classic conk-la-ree. Boreal chorus frogs chorus (run your finger against the teeth of a plastic comb to simulate). Mr. and Mrs. Mallard get into their usual nasal dispute. Maybe, for a split second, I discern a passing beaver’s silky wake.

Spacing out. Outer space, inner space, inner...

Boomshakalaka! Winnowing!

Vladimir Nabokov, who was a serious lepidopterist on top of being a genius author, instructs us vertebrates to “worship the spine and its tingle.” For a moment, my spine feels like it’s a mile long and blazing hot.

The Wilson’s snipe (Gallinago delicata, roughly “henlike dainty”) is a short-winged, thin-legged, lance-billed sandpiper that winters from the southern United States

through Central America to Venezuela and, Texan-fashion, migrates to Crested Butte for a summer of partying, feasting, making babies, etc. My Sibley guidebook reports that the birds are “uncommon and inconspicuous along grassy edges of freshwater ponds or among muddy stubble in flooded fields,” which is true – sort of, kind of, depending. If we’re talking eyes, yes, these camouflaged ground-nesters are elusive; even when they’re winnowing, looping infinity signs above the marsh, you’re unlikely to catch a glimpse because, well, they’re cruising at 30-40 m.p.h. and the sky’s a mighty big place.

But if we’re talking ears – that hollow whirlygigging, that ascending whir-tune, that sonic something – the snipe are impossible to miss. (Please, sir, remove the Bluetooth. I said REMOVE THE BLUETOOTH, YOU TECH-ADDLED CYBORG SONOFA....) By the time I’ve finished my beer beside Peanut Lake, the alpenglow has faded and the whole valley is popping off – five, 10, 15 individuals competitively soloing, adding flourishes to the avantgarde symphony of aves, amphibia and trucks on distant Gothic Road.

Five, 10, 15 individuals…47…63? I’m yanking numbers from my bum. How many winnowers are winnowing right – now!? Er, right – now!? The question is unanswerable, superfluous. Sit back and relax. As untold generations have done before you, abide with the mystery.

“Mystery” is the type of icky cliché a nature writer ought to avoid, but I genuinely mean it; ditto the untold generations. For millennia, people have cocked their heads to snipe and uttered a variation of WTF? Swedes explained the disembodied sound as a whinnying horse that lived in the clouds. Northern Germans believed it was goats hauling the thunder-god Donar across the heavens in a chariot, vigorously bleating en route. The Nunamiut of Alaska heard an avikiak – a walrus – blowing.

Not to ruin the folkloric fun, but science ultimately prevailed. Is the sonic something generated by lungs and bill? By flapping? European naturalists were stymied until 1856, when Friedrich Wilhelm Meves of the Zoological Riks-Museum in Stockholm solved the riddle with an experiment. Writes Meves: “But to convince one’s self fully that it is the first feather which produces the peculiar sound, it is only necessary carefully to pluck out such a one, to fasten its shaft with fine thread to a piece of steel wire a tenth of an inch in diameter and a foot long, and then to fix this at the end of a four-foot stick. If now one draws the feather, with its outer side forward, sharply through the air, at the same time making some short movements or shakings of the arm so as to represent the shivering motion of the wings during flight, one produces the neighing sound with the most astonishing exactness.”

Aha, the tail feathers. Specifically, air vibrating the extra stiff outer tail feathers as the bird plunges and swerves. The gentleman who translated Meves’ pioneering study for an English-reading audience, John Wooley, witnessed his colleague’s surreal demonstration: “The mysterious noise of the wilderness was reproduced in a little room in the middle of Stockholm.”

This DIY ornithological sleuthing is amusing, even inspiring – let’s rig feathery flyswatters of our own and jam out! A little room in Stockholm, however, is quite lame compared to the snipe’s habitat, the elemental scene in which winnowing occurs. Speaking of a different species, conservationist David Brower nailed it: “A condor is five percent feathers, flesh, blood and bone. All the rest is place.”

Context – and in the case of snipe, context equals wetlands at sundown. These birds are decidedly crepuscular (“appearing or active in twilight”), as am I, as is Katy Duffy, an interpretive planner at Yellowstone National Park who said in a 2014 NPR interview: “It happens at a time that’s sort of magical. I think of dusk as magical because almost anything can happen. Your imagination kind of goes wild and when you hear sounds out of this, oh, semi-darkness, they seem ethereal... otherworldly.”

By the beginning of May, having logged a dozen-plus evenings beside Peanut Lake, on the Town Ranch, and at secret mucky spots (ask the snipe), I’m compelled by my growing obsession to deepen into winnowing by camping up the Slate, near Gunsight Bridge. My kit is minimal. Ground tarp, foam pad, mummy bag. Hummus sandwich for dinner, IPA for dessert. No headlamp, no paperback novel, no gadgets, no distractions.

Spacing out. Outer space, inner space, inner...

Boomshakalaka!

The excursion is everything I could want and more. At peak winnowing, I use my breath in lieu of a stopwatch and count between four and six sonic somethings per inhale-exhale cycle. However, what really thrills me isn’t the overwhelming, Phil Spectorish “wall of sound,” but the occasional isolated snipe that, during the wee hours, subtly enters and exits my unconscious. These birds are not exclusively crepuscular; all night they arrive and depart, tail feathers vibrating my dreams.

At dawn, my toes numb, the moon dangling above Red Lady, I dump a wheelbarrow of instant coffee crystals into a half-frozen water bottle and slam the bitter potion. Ayee! Holy friggin’ Nabokovian spine tingle! Along with the caffeine jolt comes the memory of my weird sleep, the rush of those midnight snipe that flew straight through my psyche, and along comes a line from the fellow I quoted in this essay’s opening paragraph – who, in describing winnowing as “bewildering,” was, I suspect, keenly aware of the word’s overtones (be wilder).

A physician from Provo, Utah, Kevin Colver is better known among North American bird nerds for his bonus career as a recordist; he travels widely with a microphone, capturing exotic squawks and obscure screeches for audio guides. He’s credited with much of the Audubon app’s material, not to mention the red-tailed hawk cry employed in a hundred corny Hollywood films. Basically, he’s an explorer of the aural backcountry, a total boss, and he writes on his website: “Truth is, I hardly listen to human-produced music any more. I love the sounds of the natural world and they satisfy my ear and my heart.”

Thanks to the snipe, I’m increasingly with Colver. So instead of breaking camp, I sit tight in my frosty bag, waiting for the sun, trilling wrens and clicking juncos and meowing towhees intermingling with my fantasy of a society that prizes soundscapes over Gerry and the Noodling Dead (my apologies, KBUT).

Bro, I snagged a bootleg of Wilson’s Snipe, Live at Gunsight Bridge, May 2, 2021.

That’s an epic show! But you gotta check out Riverland, April 22, with guests Great Horned Owl and Hoot Squad.

I was at that concert! Wasn’t even on drugs, but I swear I heard the voice of God!

Insane! The second set absolutely wails. Reminds me of Brush Creek, June 9.

And the encore?

Haaaaa!

PAT MCGEE,

A FELLOW FAN OF THESE ‘NEATLY PUT-TOGETHER’ BIRDS

In June, I called Pat McGee, a wildlife biology professor at Western Colorado University, on the hunch that he might be, like me, a man of refined sensibility – that is, an unabashed lover of Wilson’s snipe. We talked for almost an hour, chuckling often, though neither of us said anything particularly funny. Maybe we were just glad to be talking Gallinago delicata instead of Netflix shows, doofus politicians and the S&P 500? Here’s a bit of our conversation.

PAT ON PAT:

I grew up in Littleton, Colorado, and have been in the valley for about 25 years. I teach a variety of classes, including wildlife biology, ornithology, mammalogy and ecology, and I started a non-profit organization called Sisk-a-dee that’s focused on conservation of the Gunnison sage-grouse. I have a broad interest in mountains, water, wild places and wild species, but the theme of my research is trying to understand the needs of wildlife across the annual cycle, then translating that into management and conservation.

PAT ON WHAT’S REALLY FUN ABOUT SNIPE (without my prompting):

Snipe do these cool aerial courtship displays. They fly up steeply and as they dive back down they make a mechanical noise with their feathers. It’s almost like the hooting of an owl. It travels a long distance, so they can attract mates.

ON SNIPE IN THE VALLEY:

There’s not a really good database or survey system, but I think they’re doing reasonably well. They like wet meadow areas, so they’re pretty adaptable to a lot of our agriculture.

There is a conservation category now called “Common birds in steep decline,” which snipe could be on eventually. For instance, the Brewer’s sparrow is the most common bird in the sagebrush, but its population has declined by more than half in the last 50 years. Even though a species like snipe is common, that doesn’t mean it isn’t subject to population decline, extirpation and extinction.

The owners of the Verzuh Open Space, the Martens, got in touch with me because they’re really interested in the phenology of their land – when the birds arrive in the spring, the dates and sequence of breeding events, that kind of stuff. A student of mine conducted a weekly survey from mid-May through October in 2020. You don’t get the whole phenology story from one year of surveys, but we got a start. She found quite a few snipe, and also eggs, so that was pretty awesome, given that the property isn’t all that big.

ON FRAGMENTATION:

The Martens’ property is exciting because it’s at the edge of town, and if you keep going, there’s a significant amount of acreage and riparian habitat. It’s so important to think at the landscape scale. The more we fragment habitat into smaller chunks, the less capable those chunks become supporting wildlife populations. We need these bigger, undisturbed areas where birds can do their thing. We keep losing critical pieces of the puzzle.

ON OUTDOOR RECREATION:

Everybody gets that if you bulldoze the land, you’ve lost the habitat. But what people might not get, especially in this valley where you’ve got competing values – love of wild nature versus love of outdoor recreation – is that our fun has a huge impact on wildlife. There’s a general sense that outdoor recreation and biodiversity can coexist, but at some point we have to say, Okay, can we limit some of our activities? Can we leave some spaces where people aren’t biking or running or kayaking or skiing? We’re absolutely everywhere now, and our presence is not without consequence to the wild others.

PAT ON ANOTHER GENERAL MISUNDERSTANDING:

People also tend to think that cars are more disturbing to wildlife than someone walking, but a lot of times it’s the reverse. Often wildlife will let you pass right by if you’re driving slowly, but if you’re walking or running or riding a bike, the animals are almost always going to be disturbed. In the case of birds – like on the McCormick Ranch Road – they will flush. So there’s this buffer zone that is impacted, and if you leave the road, you push it even farther off into the wetlands.

ON BEING A GROUND-NESTING BIRD:

Snipe build their nests right down next to the water, sometimes on a little mound, sometimes even with these sweet little ramps. Any bird that nests on the ground is incredibly vulnerable to a host of threats. Imagine an unleashed dog running by with its amazing sense of smell!

ON APPROACHES TO CONSERVATION:

There are two main approaches. If you put a box around the wetlands and say nobody can go in here because we’re trying to protect the birds, that’s spatial. If you say there’s a certain period when the migrant birds arrive and nest and raise their young, and we can go in there, just not during this window of time, that’s temporal. Both of these can be powerful approaches to

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conservation. I think the future status of so many species depends on some kind of self-imposed restriction on our activities. The question is whether we’ll do it.

ON THE SNIPE HUNT:

My starting place with snipe was like a lot of people’s – it’s a make-believe bird that you go out searching for with pots and pans and flashlights in the middle of the night. You go out on a “snipe hunt.” But then, when I was older, I learned it’s a real bird!

PAT ON WHAT’S REALLY FUN ABOUT SNIPE (continued):

Oh, they’re just a really neatly puttogether bird. They’ve got this long, long bill attached kind of awkwardly to a rather small head, and with it they’re able to probe deep down into the soil and tactilely locate food. And their eyes are placed on the sides of the head so they can almost see 360 degrees. They’re so secretive, so cryptic, so well adapted to living on the ground and blending in with the habitat. But then, it’s crazy – they do this amazing display, flying around the sky in amazing loops, making this beautiful hooting sound, trying to let the entire world know they exist. I just love their whole lifestyle. b

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