COMMON SNIPE. Sit 
Common, near Westacre; Lexham Common, and 
several smaller ones on the Nar and other streams 
in that portion of the county; and East Ruston, 
to the north-east, within three miles of the sea at 
Happisburgh, may be specially noticed. Both for the 
home-bred and migratory snipes these rough waste lands 
have peculiar attractions, the soft mossy turf being 
intersected by small streamlets, and in the more swampy 
portions a dense growth of reeds and sedges margins 
the little “pulk” holes or pools of water. Hast 
Ruston Common has also peculiar features, inasmuch 
as one portion, bordered by a running stream, is covered 
with small bushes of sallow and birch, where wood- 
cocks as well as snipe are frequently met with, and the 
rivulet is a favourite haunt of the green sandpiper. 
The rest of the ground, from which the turf is cut, con- 
sists of alternate ridges or “seams” of peat, and wide 
trenches in which the water is generally more or less 
deep; and as this constitutes the best feeding ground for 
the snipes, the sportsman has to pick his way along these 
narrow walls of peat, with the certainty, if unaccustomed 
to this mode of progression, of overbalancing himself, 
one side or the other, at almost every shot. Yet here, 
in a good season, from three to four hundred snipes have 
been killed, even of late years; and when I visited it in 
August, 1865, about five and twenty couples had been 
shot up to that time; all bred around the small broads 
and swamps of that wild neighbourhood, no foreign 
snipes having appeared up to that time. 
The snipe is an early breeder, and the return flights 
which visit our marshes on their northward passage, 
usually make their appearance about the second or third 
week in March; but in mild seasons, as Mr. Lubbock 
states, “parties are often found skimming round the 
edges of the broads, and alighting on the masses of 
decayed weed and floating sedge, so early as the middle 
