When my sister, Margaret, was a little girl at Stiffkey in Norfolk she thought they were lost lambs or kids calling for help but she couldn't understand why they were right up there among the stars. The unearthly calling is ventriloquial too and sometimes seems to come from all around you: behind, above, over there, no, the other side.


For an Irishman, the little people of the marsh make as happy a laugh as dances inside their own heads when the Guinness and the fiddle jig together on hitting the mellow air of midnight.


I last heard the laugh over a bog on Dartmoor in which were the bodies of at least three drowned sheep. That was near the prison.


The song of the snipe starts with a call like a clock. 'Tick-tock-tick-tock.' he calls. You might see him high above you, very rapidly crossing the sky like a little black star. Then he will dive as though shot.


It is at that moment that he laughs.


For full feature see West Sussex Gazette March 26