118 GAME-BIRDS OF INDIA 



weeds, always thicker and higher near the banks which divided the 

 uncultivated patch from its neighbours. It was in these places that 

 we found the Jack Snipe, and we noticed also that they rose almost 

 invariably from the corners where the vegetation was most rank. 

 Shooting over this ground in the morning we put up Jack, some- 

 times two or three, out of each of these scraps of grass which we 

 worked through, sometimes killing, sometimes missing. Keturning 

 again in the afternoon over the same ground, the same thing 

 occurred, and that whether we had missed or killed in the morning. 

 We shot over these fields on three consecutive days, and each day 

 we must have put up from fifteen to twenty Jack Snipe, killing 

 about ten of them. As far as I remember on no single occasion did 

 we put up a Jack from the ordinary cultivated rice-land, though we 

 bagged one or two from corners of the swamps and in cosy little 

 jungly corners running up into the higher land. 



As a rule the Jack sits very close and requires a good deal of 

 persuasion to make it rise. Nor does it run after alighting as the 

 Common Snipe so often does, and if after being flushed it again 

 settles, it will, if looked up at once, be found at the exact spot where 

 it has dropped. It is said to have an extremely strong smell, so that 

 shooting with dogs, as at home. Jack are not often passed over, but 

 out here, where dogs are, and can be, but seldom used, many Jack 

 must be passed over as they lie snug in their cover. 



Jack rise silently and very vertically, and once up and away, 

 their flight is exactly like that of a butterfly. It's flight may be 

 slower than that of either the Pintail or Fantail, but it is a very 

 disconcerting bird to fire at after one has been shooting for some 

 time at the bigger birds. Hume says that it is probably one of the 

 easiest birds in the world to shoot if you reserve your fire to the 

 proper moment, but I must personally confess that I have never yet 

 quite made up my mind as to which this proper moment is. The 

 bird's whole flight is so erratic that one can never tell what its next 

 movement is going to be; it rises, drops, dodges to one side or another 

 irrespective of all ordinary rules of flight, and then when you think 

 it has settled down to a flight in one direction, it falls to the earth 

 as if already shot, and you then walk it up to have the same 

 performance repeated. 



