Snipe and a flight of fancy

If you want to be proved wrong, publish your opinion in Shooting Times. No sooner had I finished an article about woodcock flying off with their young than I received three reliable reports of birds doing just that. I had expressed my disbelief at the idea that woodcock were able to carry their chicks in flight, drawing on a number of different theories and accounts as back up (Carried away with woodcock ‘myths’, 20 April). I even went so far as to say that if woodcock did carry their chicks in flight, surely we would have seen a video of this behaviour by now.

But within a few hours of going to press — and even before the magazine was published — I had been shown two videos of woodcock flying