166 FRANK forester's FIELD SPORTS. 



than the distmction between sixteen and fourteen tail-feathers, 

 and an inch more or less in length. 



Until I saw the American Snipe perch in tall trees, and 

 heard them cackle like laying Pullets, I regarded the differ- 

 ence between the species as merely nominal. Every day since 

 that time I have more clearly discerned its reality ; and have 

 in consequence learned to look for them, and find them too, 

 where I should as soon have thought of hunting for an Ostrich 

 as for a Snipe, in England. 



With regard to the habits of the bird in summer, I know lit- 

 tle ; but that little is enough to enable me to say that they are 

 in no wise different from his autumnal customs. The Snipe 

 returns to Lower Canada, from the northward, with the young 

 birds full fledged in July, and is at that time, and until driven 

 away by the frost, shot in immense numbers on the marshes at 

 Chateau Richer, at Goose Island, and hundreds of other places 

 dov\Ti the St. Lawrence. Along both shores of the Great 

 Northern Lakes they abound, at the same time, or a little later; 

 and accordingly as the season sets in early or late, so do they 

 regulate their arrival with, and departure fi-om, us. The earli- 

 est period at which I have ever killed migratory Snipe, birds I 

 mean not bred here, is the 12th of September; when, in 1842, 

 I bagged fourteen couple and a-half in a deep bog-meadow 

 at Chatham. The latest day, on which I have shot them is tJie 

 9th of November, at Pine Brook. I have been assured, how- 

 ever, by an excellent sportsman, on whose word I can fully 

 rely, that he has killed them on a spring brook, in which the 

 water never freezes in the hardest weather, daily, until the 

 19th of December. This was in Orange county, moreover, 

 where the fi-ost sets in at least a fortnight earlier than it does 

 below the Highlands of the Hudson. The same gentleman, 

 some years since, killed thirty-five Woodcock on the 13th day 

 of December ; a circumstance, so far as my knowledge goes, 

 unparalleled in this region. There is, however, no possible 

 doubt of the fact ; as, being himself aware of its strangeness, 

 lie took unusual pains to verify it by sufficient evidence. There 



