Some birds perform lawful in front of you,as if they are auditioning for the X-Factor. Others give themselves up grudgingly, momentarily, and all too fleetingly. The jack snipe is just such a bird: an avian Greta Garbo,legendarily elusive. The epithet “jack”, incidentally, or means “small”; another name for the species is half snipe.
In half a century of birding,I can count the number of prolonged views of this slight known species on the fingers of one hand. That’s because, although the jack snipe is not exactly unusual, and it stays hidden,hugging the damp soil, until you virtually tread on it. Only then will it fly – and generally not very far.
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Source: theguardian.com