102 BULLETIN 142, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



also across the greater part of northern Asia, and wintering south 

 to north Africa and southern Asia. 



Courtship. — Of the courtship actions in the strict sense of the 

 words we have practically no observations, as this species has rarely 

 been kept in captivity and then singly and for short periods. The 

 nuptial flight is, however, more conspicuous and was described in 

 the oft-quoted letter of John Wolley, written from Muoniovara on 

 November 27th, 1853, to W. C. Hewitson (1856), and published 

 in the third edition of " Coloured Illustrations of the Eggs of 

 British Birds" by that writer. To Wolley belongs the credit of 

 being the first to discover and bring to the knowledge of naturalists 

 the eggs of this species, for the eggs previously ascribed to this 

 species from localities much farther south were not by any means 

 satisfactorily authenticated. Wolley had been for some time at his 

 headquarters on the borders of Sweden and what is now Finland, 

 when, on June 17th, 1853, while working the great marsh at Muoni- 

 oniska, he first heard the jack snipe, though as he states : 



At the time I could not at all guess what it was — an extraordinary sound 

 unlike anything I had heard before. I could hot tell from what direction it 

 came, and it filled me with a curious suspense. My Finnish interpreter 

 thought it was a Capercally (Tetrao urogallus) and at the time I could noft 

 contradict him ; but soon I found that it was a small bird gliding at a wild 

 pace at a great height over the marsh. I know not how better to describe 

 the noise than by likening it to the cantering of a horse in the distance over 

 a hard hollow road ; it came in fours with a similar cadence and a like clear, 

 yet hollow, sound. The same day we found a nest which seemed of a kind 

 unknown to me. The next morning I went to Kharto-uoma with a good 

 strength of beaters. I kept them as well as I could in line, myself in the 

 middle, my Swedish traveling companion on one side, and the Finn talker 

 on the other. Whenever a bird was put off its nest the man who saw it was 

 to pass on the word and the whole line was to stand whilst I went to examine 

 the eggs and take them at once or observe the bearings of the spot for another 

 visit as might be necessary. We had not been many hours in the marsh 

 when I saw a bird get up before Herr Saloman, and I marked it down. In 

 the meantime the nest was found and when I csime up the owner was declared 

 to have appeared striped on the back and not white over the tail. A sight 

 of the eggs, as they lay untouched, raised my expectations to the highest pitch. 

 I went to the spot where I had marked the bird, put it up again, found that it 

 was indeed a jack snipe, and again saw it after a short, low flight drop 

 suddenly into cover ; once more it rose a few feet from where it had settled, 

 I fired and in a minute had in my hand a true jacksnipe, the undoubted parent 

 of the nest of eggs. In the course of the day and night I found three more 

 nests and examined the birds of each. One allowed me to touch it with my 

 hand before it rose, and another only got up when my foot was within 6 inches 

 of it. It was very fortunate that I was thus able satisfactorily to identify so 

 fine a series of eggs, for they differ considerably from one another. 



The great German ornithologist Naumann (1887) also describes 

 the nuptial flight, as observed by him in still weather on spring 



