A snipe in full display is one of the strangest birds of the air you could hope to see. That striped earth-brown body that makes this wader almost impossible to spot on the ground is suddenly flung up like a mud pie to the heavens. The wings flicker in quick shallow beats almost like a skylark's in mid-song, and it could even be a lark except for that extraordinary wand-like bill poking ahead of him. This weirdly disproportionate silhouette then careers in a series of fluttering ascents and even steeper descents and performs an invisible crown-shaped circuit across the skies. As he goes he creates two interlocking sounds. The background note is vocal – a constant chikk-a, chikk-a, chikk-a – but to each of its daredevil dives it adds a long-drawn shuddering sound that is mysterious and arresting.
Our forebears were bamboozled by it. They called this bird the horse gokk or, in Gaelic, gabhairin reo, "little goat of the frost", to suggest the sound's similarity to neighing or bleating livestock. They also made it a portent of thunder or rain, and, in fact, snipe often perform amid April showers. Yet the truth of that strange note was not revealed until the early 20th century in one of the unlikeliest of settings. Pagani's in Edwardian London was described as a "somewhat sleazy Italian restaurant where even the waiters' coats were stained with grease". Amid the soiled linen and abominable food, an ornithologist, Philip Manson-Bahr, unfolded to assembled members of the British Ornithologists' Union the mysteries of a snipe's lovesong. He whirled around the restaurant a cork on a long string, to which he had fixed a snipe's outer-tail feathers, and with this strange contrivance reproduced the bird's breathy song. Today my wonderful binoculars allow me to see, when this bird dives overhead, the same hard pin-like feathers vibrating even as the shuddering woodwind music is produced.