Drumming of Snipe 99 



Over the marshy ground on " The Lordship " above, 

 numbers of Curlews and Plovers were flying, and many 

 Snipe drumming. The latter is variously called Ysniten, 

 Giach, Myniar, or Tsnid, and is also known from its peculiar 

 drumming as Nyddwr^ or " Spinner." By the superstitious 

 (and there are still many such hereabouts), it is greatly dis- 

 liked, being looked upon as the voice of death, or of an 

 angel coming for the soul of one about to die. This recalls 

 very much the description of those writers who have likened 

 the noise made by the Snipe to " the wail of a lost spirit," 

 people who, as Professor Newton used sarcastically to re- 

 mark, " were presumably well acquainted with such sounds," 

 but who may have taken their simile from the old supersti- 

 tion. 



Since the time when Meves 1 first propounded the 

 theory that the drumming, or whinnying, of the Snipe was 

 produced by the stiff outer feathers of the tail, which is 

 rigidly spread out when the sound is made, much discussion 

 has taken place on the subject, some people supporting 

 Meves' views, others as strongly disagreeing with them. 

 So recently as January 1907, Mr P. H. Bahr, in a paper 

 read before the Zoological Society of London, explained 

 very fully his own experiments made with the tail feathers, 

 which led him entirely to agree with the conclusions arrived 

 at by the Swedish naturalist. But, maugre such opinions, 

 and the ingenuity displayed in the arrangement of the tail 

 feathers on wood or wire, in order, by their rapid vibration 

 in the air, to produce a sound approximating the drumming 

 of the Snipe, I cannot think that the arguments are con- 

 clusive, or that many people who have watched the bird 

 drumming overhead will be convinced by them. It must 

 be admitted by everyone who has carefully watched a Snipe 

 drumming, that during the steep descent through the air, at 

 the moment when the drumming is produced, the wings are 

 in rapid and powerful motion, and it seems to the writer 

 quite incompatible with reason that some sound should not 

 result therefrom, and that a more powerful one than any 



1 In a paper published in Sweden in 1856, a translation of which appeared 

 in the Proc. Zool. Soc. for 1858, p. 202. 



