I’ve looked for the elusive Latham’s snipe in wild and unforgiving places. The tarns of kunanyi/Mt Wellington usually but I’ve now discovered I might be looking in the wrong place.
Instead of climbing the mountain or going further afield to button-grass plains in the state’s west I should be looking closer to home. It appears the rare Latham’s snipe is likely to turn up in the most unlikely locations, including patches of wet ground in urban areas.
Vital information for the snipe hunt came during a presentation at the latest BirdLIfe Tasmania meeting by a leading authority on the species, Birgita Hansen.
I’ve never seen a Latham’s snipe and it’s high on my bucket list of species, because I have a passion for birds that are generally referred to as “waders” or shorebirds.
The snipes are not generally found at the shore, they are more birds of marsh or wet pasture but they fall into a wider wader family that includes curlews, godwits and sandpipers.
Like many of the others in the family, the Latham’s snipe is capable of remarkable non-stop, inter-continental journeys.
The Latham’s snipe we see, if we are lucky, in Tasmania during the summer months would have been hatched on the other side of the world, in the countryside of Japan or Russia, or the wilder terrain of Alaska. In its breeding range it largely prefers grassy meadows but once reaching south-east Australia it hides itself in wetlands, where its cryptic plumage gives it ideal camouflage. The bird is only seen if it is flushed, making it difficult for researchers to monitor its population.
As Dr Hansen pointed out, this non-breeding range provides a challenge for conservation because many of these marsh and wet-grassland areas are afforded no environmental protection, especially if they are within urban or suburban areas that might well be earmarked for eventual development.
A national survey program for the snipe was started 10 years ago when it was realised in the wider study of waders that very little was known about the natural history of the snipe, its range and is habitant requirements.
Dr Hansen, a senior research fellow in the Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation at Federation University, Ballarat, said movement and migration tracking in Victoria and the ACT had been undertaken using a range of methods, demonstrating snipe migrate directly across the Pacific Ocean between Australia and Asia. One bird flew more than 7000 kilometres in three days, from Hokkaido in Japan to Queensland.
The tracking has revealed migrating birds can make a number stops while travelling north through Queensland before reaching Papua New Guinea and then flying direct to the far-north.
Armed with Dr Hansen’s information on migratory sites, I’ve already started to check out wet pasture on the fringes of local suburban areas, some of it already being built on. Here’s hoping.