Wilson’s snipe are common out around the wetlands of the high desert. During breeding season, the males do this thing with their tail feathers, called winnowing, where they fly really fast and ...

With its tail. To sing with the wind, the courting snipe whips into shallow dives while flaring its tail. Air distorted by the tail feathers creates an eerie, ethereal winnowing sound like the ...

The snipe’s typical courtship habit of flying high in circles then taking shallow dives to produce a winnowing, bleating sound by vibrating its tail feathers has given the bird a variety of ...

(Courtesy photo, Glenn Cushman) – Standing in a “magic marsh” totally enveloped in stereophonic surround-sound: winnowing snipe, kongkareeing red-winged blackbirds, gutturalizing grackles ...

A closely related species, the common snipe, breeds throughout much of Eurasia. For thousands of years, people hearing the winnowing of territorial snipe have imagined ghostly beings calling from ...

It is often very hard to spot the winnowing snipe in the air. This peculiar sound and difficulty in spotting the winnowing bird may also have furthered the snipe-hunting hoax. The female selects ...