Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes April 22 2009

This wader is one of my favourites of all. It is difficult to find, has the sweetest and most entrancing call of them all, and has a charming habit of bobbing and curtseying.

When I was a young lad and used to shoot the occasional snipe on the Norfolk and Suffolk water meadows, I would even more occasionally flush a green sandpiper. Not often, because they do not freeze like snipe, which makes that bird a possible target. The green sandpiper usually rises well ahead out of harm's way.

Even so, it was a pretty obvious non-target because it would always give that lovely sweet call which I can only attempt to impart to you by writing "tloo-eet weet weet weet". Not only did that call ensure its safety when this hunter at the age of 17 was tramping the marshes all day with trembling fingers hoping to get something for supper, but so did the big white rump that shone like a lamp. The snipe had none of these defences.

So the gun was quickly lowered and the rarity saluted with a tick in the bird-watching book instead of the game diary. Off it would speed, looking mainly black and white, a curious sight indeed. Years later I still get the same excitement on seeing a green sandpiper. You can confuse it with nothing else, although I suppose the nearest look-alike might be a redshank in dull light.

You would never think, would you, that such a bird, normally only to be seen on the marshes, lakes, ponds and gravel pits, sewage farms and streams, would nest in such an unlikely place as a pine wood. Or that it would utilise the old nest of a crow or even the drey of a squirrel in a dense pine forest which has a wet clay substrate.

There are plenty of woods in Sussex that answer that description and so the green sandpiper is even suspected of breeding here in preference to its more usual habitat across Siberia. The young leap out of the nest and float to earth on their downy parachutes.

Well, this year I did not see one, but may do in July when the return migration again crosses Sussex. One of their favourite places used to be the old dewponds high up on the downs but they are almost all defunct. Once seen this sandpiper is never forgotten, believe me.