Bog Myrtle & Peat

Following the flurry of snipe, it has been fun to trace their progress through the mud over the last twenty four hours. Most of the birds have now moved on, leaving a few chubby little jacks in their wake, but they have scrawled an extensive network of tracks and patterns on the wetter ground.

One of the fields below the house was very late to be cut for silage this year, and there were fears that the grass might have to be abandoned if the weather didn’t change. There was a brief moment of opportunity a fortnight ago, and most of the silage was snatched into a clamp during the course of 36 hours. Victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat, but a bottleneck leading up to one gate has suffered horribly beneath the churning wheels of heavy machinery. The resulting mud has been a magnet for the snipe, as proved by the wealth of little tracks they have left in the sloppy stuff. I can’t ever remember seeing such copious signs of snipe, particularly in the spattering of white droppings all over the dark mud.

But at the same time, the soggy worms have drawn in other visitors. Badger tracks criss-cross the area, and it is fun to imagine the two species sharing the same space beneath the stars just a few hundred yards from my bedroom. Badgers can spell disaster for groundnesting birds during the breeding season, but it’s hard to believe that bumbling, ignorant old brock would pose much of a threat to a freshly arrived Icelandic snipe at this time of year.