Wilson's Snipe Not So Common
I was just getting ready to leave my apartment for an all day in-service meeting at the school where I teach when I received a call from Jim Demes informing me he had found a snipe in the Ravine. I have no photos of a snipe so the snipe trumped the meeting and I grabbed my gear and hurried to the park.When I arrived I found Jim and Malcom Morris sitting on a log watching the snipe. He was actively feeding and doing the "snipe shuffle," bobbing up and down in an attempt to coax worms and other tasty morsels up to the surface.
I spent about three hours photographing him, during which time the several birders showed-up. When I got home I looked up "snipe" in my Petersen's and found only the Common Snipe listed. I then when to my Sibley and there was a Wilson's Snipe. The problem with Sibley was that the color of his Wilson's Snipe looked nothing like the color of the snipe in the photo I took. I vaguely recalled that the Wilson's Snipe had been declared a separate species a few years ago and looking at Sibley's drawing I could see why.
The mystery was finally cleared up by Lloyd Spitalnik who told me that my edition of The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America must be a first edition and the first printing had some serious color errors. Most of the reds and oranges were off, Lloyd said. He told me subsequent editions have corrected colors but I can find no information about this on the Web. I am going to contact my agent (Sibley and I have the same agent) and see if this is true and if there are color notes on the first edition somewhere.
I actually prefer Petersen (don't ask me why) but the edition I am using came out in 2002.
Info on the snipe can be found on Cornell's Web site . The site says, in part:
"The Wilson's Snipe was recently recognized as a different species from the Common Snipe of Eurasia. The two snipes look extremely similar, but differ in the shape, patterning, and usually the number of the tail feathers. The Wilson's Snipe typically has 16 tail feathers, whereas the Common Snipe has 14. These numbers vary, however, and a Common Snipe may have from 12 to 18 tail feathers. "
