WISN Surveys near Clarksdale, MS: When it rains, snipe will play...

The forecasted winter storm hit the northern Arkansas and Mississippi area late last night, and we woke to a steady, cold downpour. We waited a little while for the temperatures to get above freezing, and headed to our next township in Mississippi, east of Clarksdale. When we got there, the rain had picked up, and we didn't see much of anything in our first survey. One side of the survey was bad habitat, and the other was a narrow argicultural field, with only a few killdeer. There was a graveyard though, with many common species taking refuge under trees, including dark-eyed juncos, white-throated sparrows, blue jays, cardinals, and a brown thrasher, my first of the year.

We started our second survey, and it was slow going to say the least. Visibility was pretty bad past 200 meters, and the wind was blowing cold rain right into our windows. This was tolerable, but we went very slow so as not to miss any snipe. Will had an obstructed view and bad habitat on his side, while I had a mixed agricultural field. About 800 meters into the survey, I found one snipe about 90 meters from the road. We weren't sure how the snipe would be acting in this cold rainy weather, but we were happy to see how active this snipe was. With soaking wet feathers, the snipe was a little darker in color, and looked pretty small in comparison to the puffed out ones we had seen thus far. His beak though, was unmistakable, as he probed into the soil for goodies that were surfacing with the rain. A little farther down the transect, killdeer began to appear in the mist about 250 meters away from the road, when a barrier of grass to the next field had disappeared. A ring-billed gull was also flying about. At first I didn't notice the small little brown lumps scooting about, but upon further investigation with the high-powered scope, I realized I was looking at snipe. They were similar in color to the female blackbirds that were near by, but were obviously acting different, and I could just barely pick out the probing action. If I looked hard enough, I could also make out their long bills. Twenty-one snipe turned out to be in the vicinity of around 250 killdeer, in a small stretch of field that obviously had something good to eat (likely red worms, earth worms, and small invertebrates), approximately 100 meters in length. A little ways down the road, three more snipe were in a small puddle, one of which was only 26 meters from the road. This brought the total for one survey to 25, our best so far.

snipe about 40 meters from road

After having the spotting scope fog up and the difficulties seeing past 250 meters, on top of the rain getting heavier, we decided to stop surveys for the day, and instead spend some time mapping out the county roads to continue surveys tomorrow. The rest of the habitat is this township looks really promising, and is only getting better with the rain.

As we headed back to Clarksdale, we noticed the tops of pines turning white with a layer of ice, and a few minutes ago it started to sleet. The temperatures are obviously dropping, and hopefully they don't drop enough for snow. Tomorrow we will finish up this township and head back into Arkansas, where Matt says the habitat should be more suitable, and predicts we will really start getting into snipe.