Jack Snipe

Overview

Jack Snipe: Medium, stocky sandpiper, mottled brown upperparts, paler underparts. Eyestripe is dark. Yellow stripes on back are visible in flight. Eats mollusks, insects, larvae, worms and seeds. Weak flight with rapid, shallow wing beats.

Range and Habitat

Jack Snipe: Prefers marshes, bogs, tundra and wet meadows in northern Europe and northern Russia. Winters in Great Britain, Atlantic and coastal Europe, Africa, and India. Breeds in northern taiga in wet, open areas with birch and willow forests. Winters on shallow, wet, and muddy areas Is an accidental spring migrant in the Pribilofs and in the late fall in California and Labrador.

INTERESTING FACTS

The Jack Snipe is the world's smallest snipe.
The male performs an aerial display during courtship, and has a sound like a galloping horse.
When feeding along the ground, this bird has a distinctive bobbing or bouncing style of motion, as if the bird is on springs.
A group of snipes has many collective nouns, including a "leash", "walk", "whisper", "winnowing", and "volley" of snipes.

The Jack Snipe is evaluated as Least Concern. This bird species is native to many portions of the world. The range of the Jack Snipe is about 10 million square kilometers. The population of this bird species is about 1 million individual birds. The prior rating for the Jack Snipe was Lower Risk. The rating was downgraded to Least Concern due to the stable size of the population and range of the Jack Snipe. At this time there are no known threats facing the Jack Snipe which would indicate a need for concern regarding possible future population decline.