Common Snipe (Gallinago gallinago)

County List:

Rule:

Forested or Mixed Forested/Nonforested Landscapes

1st alternative:
      Lowland Brush
   adjacent to:
      Marsh 2 - sedge and grass

2nd alternative
      Sedge Meadow
      or Bog
      or Treed Bog

Habitat List:

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Literature:

Habitat: According to Tuck, the breeding habitat of the Common Snipe in North America is restricted to organic soils, primarily peatlands mostly within northern forested regions. He points out that the snipe's breeding range coincides closely with the distribution of tamarack. In Michigan, typical nest and brood habitat includes low herbaceous vegetation, sparse brush, and scattered spruce, fir, or tamarack trees. The herbaceous vegetation must not be continuous or tall (like cattails), and must include somewhat open, wet situations. Examples are grass or sedge marshes, leatherleaf bogs, and muskeg with mixed grasses, sedges, and low shrubs such as alder, bog birch, and willow (if not too densely grown up).

Habitat: Breeding: Marshes with short vegetation, sedge bogs, alder and willow swamps, pond margins and lowlands associated with brooks and rivers where soils are mucky and the vegetation is sparse, wet meadows. Wintering: Near cost at small open creeks, springs and streams, marshes, fallow fields, cow pastures.

Special Habitat Requirements: Moist organic soils. Low scanty vegetation for nest and brood cover, bogs, swamps. Large open spaces for courtship activities.

Habitat: Marshes, bogs, wet meadows. In migration and winter, found in a variety of damp habitats including fresh and salt marshes, muddy banks of rivers and ponds, wet pastures, flooded agricultural fields. In breeding season mostly around fresh marshes and bogs, shrubby streamsides, northern tundra.

Diet: Mostly insects and earthworms. Eats many insects that burrow in damp soil or live in shallow water, such as larvae of crane flies, horse flies, various beetles, many others. At some places, diet includes many earthworms. Also eats some leeches, crustaceans, mollusks, spiders, frogs, leaves, seeds.

Nest: Site is on ground, usually well hidden in clump of grass with fine grasses, leaves, moss, sometimes with overhanging plants woven into a kind of canopy.