Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes

Sherlock Holmes knew what those queer noises were coming from the sky above Great Grimpen Mire. Sir Henry Baskerville heard them too, I feel sure. A weird, devilish sound, like strange creatures laughing at you in the darkness.

When my sister, Margaret, was a little girl at Stiffkey in Norfolk she thought they were lost lambs or kids calling for help but she couldn't understand why they were right up there among the stars. The unearthly calling is ventriloquial too and sometimes seems to come from all around you: behind, above, over there, no, the other side.

For an Irishman, the little people of the marsh make as happy a laugh as dances inside their own heads when the Guinness and the fiddle jig together on hitting the mellow air of midnight.

I last heard the laugh over a bog on Dartmoor in which were the bodies of at least three drowned sheep. That was near the prison.

The song of the snipe starts with a call like a clock. 'Tick-tock-tick-tock.' he calls. You might see him high above you, very rapidly crossing the sky like a little black star. Then he will dive as though shot.

It is at that moment that he laughs.

Not with his beak but with his tail. The two outer tail feathers that is.

These are quite stiff: about two inches long and held out at almost right angles. The air passing rapidly over the upper surface of the wing causes the two feathers to flutter and bleat.

The painting here by Philip Rickman from Walpole-Bond's Birds of Sussex shows how this happens. But the days of the snipe are numbered, it seems. There has been a massive decline. About 20,000 pairs breed in the UK.

Hardly any of these now breed in Sussex. About 400 birds overwinter in our county. Seventy years ago, a single wisp (flock) of snipe could number 500, as seen in a field at Firle, another on Barnhorn marshes near Bexhill.

On Amberley Wildbrooks there were very large wisps. Snipe then bred across all the river meadows but also inland on dryish moors such as Ashdown, Iping, Ambersham and even at South Harting and Crawley.

Today, hardly a one. But I shall listen out carefully this April on Amberley Wildbrooks at dusk. Hoping, hoping to hear that unearthly laugh from the sky, the call of the flying goat.

Could anything be more weird than that?

This feature first appeared in the West Sussex Gazette on March 26. To read it first, buy the West Sussex Gazette every Wednesday.