Going across a stretch of marshland the other day, I flushed a couple of snipe from the bottom of a muddy dyke. They went up one after the other, each giving a rasping hiss, then zigzagging a little over the ground before soaring into the sky.

This was the only view that many people got of snipe before the days of binoculars and hides in nature reserves. Nowadays, with carefully maintained “scrapes” in front of the hides, it is quite easy to see snipe standing in the vegetation by pools.

Of course. the most dramatic thing about them is their inordinately long bills, which astonish me whenever I see them. They prod these into the mud, using the sensitive tip to detect and seize the small creatures they are seeking.

However, when the sun shines, their plumage is almost as remarkable. They have a long stripe on top of their heads and stripes above and below the eyes, and these look golden in the sun, while their whole barred body has an orange glow.

In summer, one can see them more easily in the sky over the boggy uplands and large marshes where they breed, from the Ouse Washes in Cambridgeshire to the islands of the Outer Hebrides.

The males fly round and round over their territories making a loud “chipper, chipper” cry. They sometimes turn on their backs and glide upside down. At other times they climb into the air, then dive down making a weird bleating note, usually called drumming. For centuries it was debated whether this note was produced vocally or by some other physical means. The matter was put at rest in Britain in 1912, at an ornithological club dinner in Pagani’s, a fashionable London restaurant. One member, Sir Philip Manson-Bahr, had stuck the two outer tail-feathers of a snipe in a cork at the end of a string. He whirled it round, and the familiar bleating filled the restaurant.

A later demonstration by the writer and birdwatcher Eric Parker confirmed that it was these that produced the sound when the bird dived. He attached a pair of the feathers at the correct angle to an arrow and shot the arrow into the sky. As it came down it drummed just like a snipe.