802 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 
it being most frequently found in pairs, and instances 
the fact of a fen-man, at Sutton, having “killed six in 
the second week of September, 1835; four of these 
birds were in pairs, and proved male and female respec- 
tively.” The heaviest bird he has known weighed 
ten ounces, but the usual weight is from seven and a 
half to eight and a half ounces. I have never had the 
good fortune to meet with the great snipe, although 
I have known it killed the next day on the very same 
marsh to which I had devoted the whole of the previous 
morning. Of some thirty specimens, however, that I 
have handled at different times, the finest, killed on the 
8th of September, 1858, weighed nine and a half ounces.* 
Since I commenced making notes of such occurrences I 
cannot remember an autumn in which I have not 
known one or more killed in Norfolk; and in some 
years they have been pretty numerous; but their usual 
scarcity, in these parts, brings them invariably under the 
birdstuffers’ hands, and not, as in other countries, to 
table, as one of the finest of feathered dainties. Messrs. 
Sheppard and Whitear, who had also opportunities 
of examining several Norfolk killed specimens, remark 
that in this snipe the “legs are of a light flesh colour 
blended with a slight tinge of green. The length of 
the bill is subject to great variation.” 
In Mr. Hunt’s “ List” five examples are said to have 
been killed in the same week, in various parts of the 
county in the autumn of 1826; and in 1831, Mr. Lubbock 
states that “many were killed during August and 
September.” Mr. Rising also informs me that he 
once shot six in one day, in his marshes at Horsey, and 
* Under the head of great snipe, in Daniel’s “ Rural Sports” 
(vol. iii, p. 182, note), the author states that “a gentleman of 
Yarmouth, in September, 1805, shot a snipe of the astonishing 
weight of fourteen ounces,” which is as hard to credit as the story 
of the Norfolk woodcock that weighed twenty-seven ounces. 
