92 BULLETIN 142, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



good dogs quartering the ground in plain sight and with an oc- 

 casional shot at a swiftly flying bird, is one of the delights of a 

 crisp autumn day. The birds will lie closely on a calm day, but 

 on a windy, blustering day they are restless and wild. It is well 

 to hunt down wind as the birds usually rise against the wind and 

 will fly towards and then quartering away from the shooter. When 

 two men hunt along a narrow marsh, the man on the windward side 

 will get most of the shooting. Snipe are usually shot on wet meadows 

 or marshes, but that they are often found in other places is shown 

 by the following quotations from D wight W. Huntington (1903) : 



Audubon says the snipe is never found in the woods, but Forester mentions 

 finding it in wild, windy weather early in the season in the skirts of moist 

 woodlands under sheltered lee sides of young plantations, among willow, alder, 

 and brier brakes, and, in short, wherever there is good, soft, springy feeding 

 ground perfectly sheltered and protected from the wind by trees and shrubbery. 



Abbott says : " During the autumn I have found them along neglected meadow 

 ditches overhung by large willow trees, and again hidden in the reeds along the 

 banks of creeks. I have shot them repeatedly in wet woodland meadows. I 

 have often found snipe in bushy tracts and among the swamp willows, but I 

 have never seen them in the forest, and believe they so rarely resort to the 

 woods that it would not be worth while to seek them there." 



Snipe must have been exceedingly abundant .50 or 60 years ago, as 

 the oft-quoted achievements of James J. Pringle (1899) will illus- 

 trate. He was not a market hunter but a gentleman (?) sportsman, 

 who shot for' the fun of it and gave the birds away to his friends. 

 His excuses for excessive slaughter and his apologies for not killing 

 more are interesting; he writes: 



The birds being such great migrants, and only in the country for a short 

 time, I had no mercy on them and killed all I could, for a snipe once missed 

 might never be seen again. 



I shot with only one gun at a time ; had no loader, but loaded my gun 

 myself; had I shot with two guns and had a loader I would, of course, have 

 killed a great many more birds, but in those days and in those parts it was 

 impossible to get a man that could be trusted to load. 



During the 20 years from 1867 to 1887 he shot, on his favorite 

 hunting grounds in Louisiana, 69,087 snipe and a total of 71,859 of 

 all game birds ; but his shooting fell off during the next 10 years for 

 he increased his grand total of snipe to only 78,602 and of all game 

 birds to only 82,101 ! His best day, undoubtedly a world's record, 

 was December 11, 1877, when he shot in six hours 366 snipe and 

 8 other birds. On his best seven consecutive shooting days, alternate 

 days in December, 1877, he killed 1,943 snipe and 25 other birds. 

 During the winter of 1874-75 he killed 6,615 snipe. Captain Bo- 

 gardus, the famous trap shot, killed, with the help of a friend, 

 340 snipe on one day in Illinois, and seldom got less than 150 on 

 good days. With such excessive shooting all through the fall, 



