Snipe

At our local nature reserve yesterday I spent some time watching snipe - a pair - prospecting along one of the banks of the pool there. I've been watching them for days, in fact, whenever I've been up there. They are devilishly hard to spot, but lovely birds, their cryptic plumage of streaked browns and buffs exactly blending in with the cut dead reeds and waterside foliage within which they lurk.

Both the colours and the markings blend so perfectly with the background that snipe can be all but invisible unless some movement gives them away. Their long beaks allow them to probe deeply into leaf litter, mud and soft ground, as they search for food. The thing that impacted on me was not just how hard it was to see them, how well camouflaged they were, but that the strip along the shore within which they were lurking was in fact very narrow and quite discrete. If one of the birds had been just a foot or two away from where I saw them, it would have shown up quite clearly against short green grass or lighter coloured stubble.

So it isn't just that they have a plumage that allows them to hide, they also have the ability, it would seem, to select and keep to the sort of background against which that plumage works. This leads me to speculate as to how self-aware birds actually are. How clear an image does a bird have of itself, of what it looks like, and therefore of what surroundings to seek so as to (if it's a snipe) "disappear"? Is it purely instinctive, or does it require an element of conscious planning? Do birds help each other to know whether or not they are blending in as they should? There's so much we can't know!