For months, the night-time soundscape outside my house has been tawny owls, and only tawny owls. They’ve hooted from the roof, from the trees – they’ve even warbled softly down the chimney.
Such is their profusion, they’ve given the illusion of abundance to the dark winter void beyond my front door. But it’s only now, as spring arrives, I realise how quiet that outside world has been.
A few weeks ago, I stepped out one evening for some fresh air before going to bed. A reassuringly familiar tawny owl was hooting, but it was now merely a bit player in an altogether more fantastical production, thanks to the arrival of just two new species: lapwing and snipe.
Both of these birds make surreal and weirdly artificial sounds that, if you’ve never heard them before, you’d be hard pushed to identify as birds at all. Or animals, for that matter.
I encountered my very first lapwing in the Cairngorms, and I did a double take because it sounded like an old Atari games console. Remember those?
With a woodgrain finish to match your furniture, Ataris were big in the 1970s. As were lapwings, funnily enough. But, while lapwings certainly aren’t as elusive in 2023 as Atari consoles now are, they’re sadly heading in a similar direction, with species numbers down 58% since 1994.
Losing these birds doesn’t bear thinking about, for lapwings are delightfully strange creatures. Every noise they make sounds electronic, with a peculiar, synthetic fuzziness to their voices, especially at the start of each utterance. It makes them sound like they’ve been pre-recorded or sampled, and are then being played back through a single ropey, old speaker.
Little wonder I’m instantly transported back to many a seaside amusement arcade in the coastal towns of my youth when I hear lapwings. Not the sophisticated, digitally rendered arcades we have today. Nope, I’m talking early 1980s, when the analogue bleeps and blasts of Pac-Man and Asteroids were cutting edge innovation.
Lapwings have their distinctive “peewit” call: an onomatopoeia that gives them their alternative name. But they also have an odd warble that often precedes each “peewit” – a rapid, double noise that sounds like Space Invaders when you successfully blasted an invader.
What does snipe drumming sound like?
Odder still, in this Deeside amusement arcade, is a sound so bizarre and incongruous that it’s guaranteed to freak first-timers out. And, because its owner is notoriously shy and nocturnal, you almost never see who or what is responsible. The sound just bubbles out from the darkness.
I was duly freaked out the first time I heard it. I was on Rum. No, not the drink – although that would explain a lot.
I was hunkering down on Loch Scresort at dusk, watching for otters, when a strange noise started up just metres from me. One moment, it sounded far away; the next, it was right behind me. And it was LOUD!
I scurried back to the hostel, found someone knowledgeable, and then embarrassed myself by trying to reproduce the noise. “Oh, that’s a snipe, drumming,” he eventually deduced.
The snipe is a small, dumpy wading bird, with exquisite mottled brown camouflage, and an oversized, straight beak that’s almost as long as its body. It’s a strange looking thing. But, stranger still, unlike the lapwing, the snipe’s unearthly noise isn’t vocal.
Its sound is produced by the male’s breeding display flight. He sticks two of his tail feathers out at 90 degrees and then, when he reaches an optimum speed on his dive, the feathers vibrate and produce this “drumming” sound.
Not that it sounds anything like drumming, mind – a fact illustrated perfectly by typing “what does snipe drumming sound like?” into Google.
Sounds straight out of a 1980s arcade
You’ll quickly find folk offering conflicting comparisons, none of which sound anything like one another: a threshing machine, a wobbleboard, “like something you’d hear on the original series of Star Trek”. Or, best of all: “taking a metre length of hose and whirling it around your head”.
Evidently, it’s hard to pin down. But, in my opinion, the snipe’s drumming still comes from the 1980s amusement arcade. It’s the ascending, wobbly noise that played immediately after you put coins into Frogger.
And, if that’s before your time, imagine the electronic opening bars of song Freak Like Me by pop band Sugababes, because they lifted that straight from Frogger. And Frogger, I’ll wager, lifted it straight from a snipe.
Together with the lapwing, this peculiar electronic soundscape has, therefore, been the noisy backdrop to my daily routine for the last couple of weeks now, but I’m determined not to allow the novelty factor to wear off, or to take these remarkable birds for granted.
Their futures are, after all, uncertain, and I’m well aware of how privileged I am to have both snipe and lapwing in my life, beeping and bubbling and fuzzing away. My very own Deeside Amusements, right outside my door.
Ben Dolphin is an outdoors enthusiast, countryside ranger and former president of Ramblers Scotland
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