Click here to return to the first page
on this snipe. Click here to return to the second
page on this snipe. Click here to return to the third
page on this snipe. Update: August 31, 2004: added
this page of comparisons of the presumed gallinago:
I've been puzzling over how the white tips to the secondaries
could look so differently (narrower) in my flight photos compared
to the detailed descriptions of all the obervers (e.g. three of
us Europeans with the appropriate experience felt that the white
tips were within range of European gallinago.) This experiment
may provide an answer:-
The first image below by Park Hyong-ook - kindly supplied by Kim Hyun-tae via his
fabulous web site - shows the underwing of a "Siberian"
Common Snipe from South Korea in October, next to the Fort Worth,
Texas bird (right):
- there are many similarities with the Fort Worth snipe - keep
in mind that the Texas snipe is a late Spring bird that is molting,
and the innermost secondary greater coverts on the underwings
seem to either be heavily-worn or missing, hence the lack of white
tips:-
- but the trailing edge of the secondaries
has a much thicker white band on the Korean bird than on the Texan
bird. The Texan bird was of course photographed in flight,
so that there is likely to be some motion-blur due to my pan-rate
not matching the speed of the bird. In other words, I was either
moving a bit faster or a bit slower than the bird when I took
the picture (the odds of me being exactly in-sync on such a fast-flying
bird are almost zero.) As an experiment I used my Photo Editor's
(PaintShopPro v.7) "motion blur" feature to adjust the
image:- first I applied forward motion in the direction perpendicular
to the wing:
- then I applied it 180 degees opposite:
Note that on both versions, the net effect is to NARROW the
white trailing edge quite a bit, plus ENLARGE the black
bars in the axillaries; the other white bands on the wing
coverts are also slightly narrowed, but not as much as the trailing
edge. So if this same effect were at play in my flight photos,
it would not only mean that the white secondary tips are
likely thicker than portrayed in my images, but that the
black bars in the axillaries are narrower - yet even in
their (presumed) thickened state in my images, these black bars
are much more like gallinago than delicata; if they
were even narrower, they may be well beyond the range for delicata?
Note that I do not claim that the secondary tips on the Texas
bird are as thick as those of the Korean bird, but I do suggest that
they are - allowing for the narrowing-effect demostrated here
- well within range of Siberian Common Snipe, which are documented
as sometimes having much narrower white secondary tips than considered
normal for birds seen in Europe.
Compare the Texas bird with the adjusted pics of the Korean bird:
