CHAPTER XXXI 

 SNIPE 



Sufferings during hard weather — Rapid recovery — Three kinds of British 

 snipe — Pleasures of snipe-shooting — Sport in Ireland — English water 

 meadows — Foreign shooting — " Drumming of the snipe " — Mr. Boyes' 

 observations — Migrations of British snipe — Nesting-places — Snipe in 

 South Africa — The common snipe not found there — A pardonable 

 mistake — Sport with African snipe— Snipe as table birds. 



DURING hard weather no bird suffers more than 

 the snipe. Their soft, wet feeding-grounds are 

 frozen hard and covered with snow, the springs and 

 runnels are ice-bound, and the birds, if the frost holds 

 for long, perish in hundreds. They lose their condition 

 as quickly as they renew it again, and in a hard and 

 prolonged frost the sufferings of these dainty sporting 

 birds are intense. Their food — worms, larvae, and 

 minute shellfish — is only to be procured by boring with 

 those long bills with which nature has expressly pro- 

 vided them, and with every spot of moist, boggy soil 

 iron-bound by frost, as it is in a very hard winter, 

 the birds are quickly starved to death and die miserably. 

 If the frost is not too hard, snipe usually rely upon 

 these soft spots, the banks and beds of running streams, 

 and the neighbourhood of springs, as places of 

 sanctuary and refreshment, when the more open bogs 

 and marshes are gripped by the hard weather. It has 

 often been observed that snipe resort to turnip fields 

 during a period of frost. Their instinct tells them 

 that the light moisture frozen upon the leaves of these 



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