146 FIELD SHOOTING. 



sentations, but I do say that they may have been 

 mistaken, and that the birds which alighted on 

 trees while the snipe were hovering and bleating 

 were not snipe. It is the easiest thing in the world 

 to see snipe hovering in the spring in places where 

 they abound. Take a day in April when the sun 

 is not bright and there is a hazy atmosphere. 

 On such a day the snipe are at it nearly all day 

 long. There will be first one and then another 

 going through with this performance, and you 

 may sometimes hear three or four at it at once, 

 though not very close together. I have never 

 met a man who had seen, or pretended to have 

 seen, a snipe alight on a tree or fence at this or 

 any other time. 



Snipe begin to arrive with us in the fall, about 

 the middle of October, but they do not come 

 down from the north in large numbers so early 

 as that date. At the last of October they are 

 commonly plentiful, but are not found in the places 

 where they were so abundant in the spring. In 

 the fall there are not one-fourth as many in the 

 bottoms of Salt Creek and the Sangamon as there 

 are in April. Neither are they so well distribut- 

 ed over the country along the sloughs. In go- 

 ing south they keep more to the lines of the big 



