322 AMERICAN GAME BIRD SHOOTING 
cate weapon with which nature has provided the snipe 
for the capturing of its food. It therefore is appar- 
ent that of all the wet lands there are only certain 
parts which contain snipe food. 
Of the places which afford snipe food some are good 
throughout the whole season, as, for instance, the 
sloughs and marshes and parts of river valleys of the 
prairie country wherein it makes its summer home. 
Other places are but temporarily available, as lands 
made soft and wet by heavy rains. Such places may 
serve it well for many weeks, as in Louisiana and 
Texas in the fall and winter months, during the rainy 
season, which in those States is largely the equivalent 
of winter. Again, the snipe may seek its food in places 
which are quite wet, as in some of the large wet 
marshes, and again, in some other sections, it may 
make its haunts on upland so firm that the hunter may 
walk thereon pleasantly and dry-shod. 
While the woodcock, its long-billed confrére, is a 
bird of the covert, the snipe is a bird of the open. On 
these birds nature lays a more severe restriction con- 
cerning a late stay in the North than she does on any 
other game bird, for a snipe or woodcock attempting 
to gain a subsistence in a frozen country is in a pa- 
thetic situation indeed. 
Its food is said to be larve, tender roots of plants, 
and worms, which it secures by boring, and also such 
insects and other edible food as it can secure on top 
of the ground. 
To the local sportsman the snipe’s habits in the 
