The Latham’s Snipe Project has been fortunate to receive funding through a partnership between Federation University and the Arthur Rylah Institute (Victorian State Government) to undertake a new tracking program. This funding has come from the Federal Government DCCEEW through the Renewable Energy Research Initiative and is intended to develope species-species guidance for reducing impacts of renewable energy developments on Latham’s Snipe and a bunch of other threatened species.
Birgita is leading this research program with support from her research centre (Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation) at FedUni. With a large group of experts and volunteers, the team successfully deployed 43 GPS Bluetooth tags on snipe during spring 2025 at the two largest monitoring sites in the Victoria and South Australia: Peterborough wetlands on the Great Ocean Road and Fox Lake in Robe. Most of these tags have been funded through the RERI project but there were also some tags left over Lori Gould’s PhD tagging research in Canberra.
The GPS tags use Bluetooth technology to transmit data to a nearby receiving device or “Hub”. The hub is installed on a tall pole (which we call a tower) so that the Hub has an unobstructed view across the wetland. This helps ensure line-of-sight with any snipe carrying tags that are on the ground, either hiding in the vegetation or out foraging. Three towers have been installed at Peterborough and one tower on the bird hide at Fox Lake.
The Bluetooth Hub installed on a tower at the Fox Lake bird hide.
These towers are receiving data regularly day and night. Twice a day the data on the Hub is transmitted to the manufacturer’s servers via the mobile phone network. The range of the Hub is up to 800m, so if the birds return to the area where the Hub is installed the data on their GPS tags will be received. Sometimes even birds flying past might transmit data, so long as they’re in range for a few seconds.
Latham’s Snipe BM captured at Fox lake on 10th November 2025.
There is regular data coming in from about half the birds, with the other birds likely elsewhere in landscape and out of range of the receiver.
Recent data from 3 snipe in PeterboroughRecent data from 2 snipe in Robe
The data we receive from the tags will provide us important information on roosting and foraging areas birds use, day behaviours and flight height / flight speed, with which to assess potential wind turbine collision risk.
Snipe documentary
August 29, 2024
We are excited to share with you a short documentary film on the snipe project (see below). It was written, directed and produced by Richard Snashall and showcases the extensive research efforts to monitor, understand and protect the Latham Snipe. In the video, Birgita and the Canberra snipe team discuss their work and the extensive citizen scientist efforts over many years to improve knowledge about this species. The documentary was shortlisted for the Far South Film Festival in August 2024 at Merimbula. We thank Lori Gould for helping coordinate funding to support the production.
The map reporting tool uses both Latham’s Snipe Project data and Atlas of Living Australia data to help raise awareness about the value of urban wetlands for biodiversity. It captures data from Melbourne only at the moment, but the idea will be to extend it in the future to other urban centres.
You can read more about the project background on the ALA blog.
A Latham’s Snipe roosting with Sharp-tailed Sandpipers in saltmarsh at Smithon, Tasmania. This is one of the largest snipe sites in the state and occurs close to the township. Photo: Jenny Ostenfeld
This week, the Weekend Birder released an episode in their podcast series featuring Birgita talking about the project. You can access it via Spotify or on online at: Weekend Birder episode 79
As some of you with have heard, Latham’s Snipe were uplisted to Vulnerable under the EPBC Act in January of this year. This is the first time in Australia that the species has had a conservation status, and is in recognition that the species is under threat and likely to be declining. The biggest threat to snipe in Australia is wetland habitat loss, hence the purpose of the Valuing Urban Wetlands project. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all the volunteers and people who have contributed to the snipe survey efforts over the years. This has been instrumental in informing the national conservation assessment and the recognition that Latham’s Snipe is a threatened species in Australia.
Lori Gould’s PhD research has been tracking along really nicely and she now has two seasons worth of movement data from tagged snipe in Canberra, which she is currently analysing. The results so far show very similar movement patterns to what we found in Port Fairy years ago with the radio tracking. Most snipe move predictably distances of usually 1-2km and up to 5km nightly between their daytime roost sites and night time foraging sites. She has also had two birds return to Jerrabomberra wetlands after their breeding season and transmitting their tag data to the Bluetooth receiver at the wetland. One bird went to northern Japan and the other went to SW Sakhalin. We were not expecting to get long distance movement data like that from these tags, and we were very excited to get these results. See attached two images.
The Wild Bird Society of Japan are conducting field work again this season on the breeding grounds and we hope they get some great results from their surveying and catching efforts.
Lastly, we have had a short documentary about the snipe project work in Canberra done, which was produced by Richard Snashell. The full doco will be available later in the year.
2022-2023 snipe survey results and other news
October 11, 2023
Thank you for your patience with my poor communication over the last 12 months. I have finished tidying up the survey results and some fascinating patterns have appeared. Here are some highlights from the results:
September 2022 had the highest September count ever at 1492 snipe for 132 survey sites. The next highest in September was 1312 for 146 sites in 2020. Much of this we can attribute to the extraordinary wet season we had last year. For example, sites that had unusually high numbers in September 2022 were:
November and January were surprisingly lower, which is unusual – 1135 snipe (112 sites) and 927 snipe (102 sites), respectively. Some of this drop is caused by fewer sites being surveyed than normal, but this does not explain all the differences. I have put in a table below of the regional summaries – please note that these regions are groupings of individuals sites, summarised in a way that makes sense to me.
There were a few sites that also had unusually high numbers in other months:
Nov – Point Fullarton (Gippsland) 40 snipe – this site is currently threatened with a housing development proposal (sadly, a common story for urban snipe)
Nov – Smithton (NW Tas) 140 snipe
Jan – BulBul Crescent / Kekul st wetlands (Newcastle) 126 snipe
Nov – Moyne estuary (Port Fairy) 211 snipe
Peterborough on the Victorian coast remains the (consistently) largest site with total counts of 123 (Sept), 158 (Nov) and 161 (Jan)
Most of the September 2023 count data are also entered. So far the total count is around 600 snipe for about 95 sites. These numbers haven’t been carefully error checked yet so these numbers are preliminary. This is one of the lowest September counts since the snipe surveys went national in 2016. This lower count also appears to be due to the slightly earlier timing of the surveys compared with previous years – usually we survey around 1 week later and seems like birds just simply had not arrived yet at some of the south-eastern Australian sites.
In other news, The Wild Bird Society of Japan are tracking snipe again from Hokkaido and the last update from late September, they had a bird somewhere near the Kiewa River valley in north-east Victoria. This is really great news and it has been fabulous to hear about the tracking success of the WBSJ.
First ever international Latham’s Snipe leg flag recovery
We had some very exciting news in September. A Japanese-marked Latham’s Snipe, captured by our colleague ODAYA Yoshiya in Ibaraki prefecture, was photographed at Lismore Lake by Lachlan Cooper. The photos below are from Lismore lake, where the bird was resighted, and of the bird when originally captured. It was banded on 28 August 2021 as a first year, and resighted on 05/09/2023 at Lake Lismore. It is a confirmed age 3 bird (i.e. in its 3rd year).
While there have been thousands of resightings of other leg flagged shorebird species over time across the flyway, there has never been a single re-sighting of a Latham’s Snipe outside its country of capture (to our knowledge). And even within its country of capture, leg flag re-sightings of snipe are exceptionally rare.
So this is a ground breaking outcome for capture-based studies on this species.
Latham’s Snipe N58 sighted and photographed at Lismore Lake by Lachlan Cooper, September 2023.N58 when first captured as a juvenile in Ibaraki Prefecture, August 2021. Photograph courtesy of ODAYA Yoshiya.
Latham’s Snipe project update
March 03, 2023
Prepared by Lori and Birgita
We’d like to start this update by reassuring people that the lack of updates for so long does not mean nothing has been happening in the snipe project – quite the opposite!
Since last year, we have had a new series of tracking efforts going on, both in ACT and in Japan. Lori has been undertaking tracking as part of her PhD with a different type of tag, with great success (see below). And the Wild Bird Society of Japan deployed more 2g solar PTTs in Hokkaido last year, and now have 5 snipe that have migrated to Australia and 3 that also returned to Japan.
We have also completed another season of national snipe surveys, which have produced some fascinating results.
ACT tracking update 28th February 2023
This Snipe season we set out to attach up to 20 small 3.5g GPS bluetooth devices to Latham’s Snipe at Jerrabomberra Wetlands (ACT) to investigate fine scale local movements and behaviour to inform habitat use (and land management more broadly). These bluetooth devices rely on a base station or iphone to detect and download the data, and we made an educated guess that a proportion of the birds would stay at the wetlands for us to receive data from. These devices are a lot cheaper and more accurate than PTT satellite trackers ($150 compared with $6000 each) so we were able to purchase more of them. We then constructed a tower using an aerial attached to some conveniently located cattle yards to elevate a hub (base station) to expand the Bluetooth range from 80m on our phones to 800m. After a few teething issues this hub has worked well.
Hub mounted on an aerial on some cattle yards at Jerrabomberra Wetlands
The plan was that the devices would stay affixed to the birds for up to 2 months after which time they would fall off, so the bird didn’t have to carry them when data wasn’t being collected (i.e. when they leave for migration).
So in early December we set out after sunset to set up nets ready for our first catch the next morning on the 10th December. We caught two birds. We did this again on the 11th December and caught five birds. Not a bad start. We attached the devices with beading elastic using leg loop harnesses and all birds seemed healthy and well (unlike the 25 volunteers who were all very tired from getting two hours sleep for two nights). Straight away we were getting high quality track data from five of the seven birds which was more than what we had initially ever dared to hope for. Although the choice of these Bluetooth devices was well researched, they had not been used on wader birds such as Latham’s Snipe before.
Bolstered by our success, we organised another catch for the 13th and 15th January. Again, our wonderful volunteers put their hands up to help and included people from the Japanese embassy, ACT Parks and Conservation Service, Canberra Ornithologists Group, Australian National University, CSIRO, the Woodlands and Wetlands Trust and the ACT Young Rangers Club (many of whom were 8 years old when the Latham’s Snipe project started in 2015 and are now highly skilled birders and research assistants). The volunteers deserve special mention because without their involvement we couldn’t do this work.
This time we managed to catch a whole zero / nil / nada on the first night and we were a bit disappointed. Although usually a reliable catching spot, the water levels had risen and many of the birds had obviously found somewhere better to hang out. Not to be outdone, we had a group huddle around the big TV at the wetlands to look at where the birds we had already tracked were going. We found our Snipe hotspot! So out we went on the Saturday night and counted 38 birds leaving their roost site to feed for the night. Once they left, we assembled the nets in an H shape and decided on three flush teams for the morning. We also set up a net at a wetlands we affectionately know as the ‘Ditch’. Well, the next morning, things went like clockwork and we caught 12 birds – the most we have ever caught in one morning!
The birds were processed by our highly skilled teams of volunteers and the were trackers affixed. The birds were all released successfully. We received data from all of these birds and the technology was working really well. Many of the volunteers agreed to put the ‘Ecotopia’ app on their phones so that we had lots of people out scanning for birds when they were out and about. So by now we have 19 out of the 20 trackers on birds. Having one tracker left to deploy was too much to bear, so we organised an impromptu mini-catch in the ‘Ditch’ on the 19th January and to our absolute amazement, we caught just one bird and it was one we had put a leg flag on in 2018! So… job done.
Latham’s Snipe carrying tracking device (Photo: David Cunningham)
The results so far have been amazing. We obtained high quality data from 16 out of the 20 birds for most of January which dropped to 12 birds for most of February and then down to 5 birds at the end of February. We are talking thousands of data points which will be analysed in coming months, but the preliminary observations are as follows:
Most of the birds haven’t left Jerrabomberra Wetlands for any length of time and roost in the main part of the Jerrabomberra wetlands during the day, then head over to the grass-growing area (Canturf) or the paleo-channel area to the north during the night to feed.
We recaptured 3 birds from previous years, one of which has been coming back to the wetlands for 5 years.
Some birds go on long journeys to feed. For example several birds travelled 20-30km to feed at night and then returned to the wetlands to roost. They leave around 8pm and return at around 6am.
One bird travelled all the way to Nowra on the NSW south coast for a couple of days but then returned to the wetlands
Hiroyuki takes a holiday to Nowra and returns to the Wetlands some days later. Source of data: Lori GouldSome birds do not leave the Jerrabomberra Wetlands at all, roosting at the wetlands during the day and heading over to Canturf grass farm at night to feed. Source of data: Lori GouldThis bird (Lily) heads out around Canberra to feed at night then returns to the wetlands to roost. Source of data: Lori Gould
The success of these devices and the data received has been way beyond our expectations and we are now wondering whether the devices will stay attached for migration. If they do, it is highly likely that a proportion of birds will return to the wetlands next season due to their apparent site fidelity. We will not get ahead of ourselves yet, but we will set the devices accordingly just in case.
The Latham’s Snipe project team would like to extend our sincere thanks and appreciation for the many volunteers and supporters. As mentioned earlier, we couldn’t do it without them all.
Snipe team volunteers
Wild Bird Society of Japan tracking
Between 2020 and 2022, the WBSJ have deployed 10 2g solar PTTs (Microwave Telemetry) and have had tremendous success with these smaller tags, affixed to birds using leg loop harnesses. In 2021-2022, three birds migrated to Australia and spent their non-breeding season across a range of different areas in eastern Australia, ranging from coast Victoria to the ACT and NSW alps, western Sydney wetlands and northern NSW tablelands farmland.
In 2022-2023 two more tagged snipe made their way to Australia and one spent the early part of the season in Corner Inlet (eastern Victoria) and the other was in production landscapes west of Cowra in NSW. More information to follow.
National Snipe Surveys
The national surveys produced some amazing results this season. Some sites broke their own records like Moyne estuary in Port Fairy, where 188 snipe were recorded in September and 211 snipe were recorded in November! Sites like Peterborough, Fox Lake and Smithton all had high numbers of snipe again. But then there were some surprises too, like Phillip Island which had zero snipe in November!
The data entry is still being done, and we won’t now the final numbers for the season for a few weeks. However, it looks like this very wet season in eastern Australia is going to produce some really intersting results. Birgita would like to thank Jack Winterbottom for his able assistance with data entry.
