THE GAME BIRDS OF INDIA, BURMA AND CEYLON. 559 



many get very close to it and some do even better. The same 

 thing occurs in Burmah, and 100 couple to one gun has two or 

 three times been beaten in that Province, 



The honour of making the biggest bag on record belongs to 

 Mr. W. K. Dods who, on the 18th February 1900, shot 131 couple 

 of snipe and a quail. In e-pistola Mr. W. K. Dods writes to me — 

 "On the 17th February 1900 information reached me that 

 there were a considerable number of snipe on a particular jheel of 

 immense extent about 100 miles from Calcutta where I had 

 already made some good bags. I accordingly started off that 

 night well provided with cartridges in a slow jolting train that 

 eventually deposited me at dawn within an hour's tramp of my 

 destination. 



" Some miles walk took me through cultivated country until the 

 landscape, getting gradually more open, brought me to a large 

 swamp tract of country covered with about the worst kind of 

 ' ponk ' it has ever been my fate to shoot in, a black reeking mud 

 composed entirely of decayed and decaying vegetable matter in 

 which one frequently sank to one's thighs. Growing in this ooze 

 were dense clumps of hoogola reeds interspersed with fairly open 

 glades, where birds could feed, and with other patches of thin null 

 jungle in which snipe delight to rest during the day, secure from 

 the too pressing attentions of the numerous hawks that infest these 

 marshes. 



" Though good for snipe, thin null does not make things any 

 easier for the shooter, already heavily handicapped by the soft and 

 insecure foothold. A snipe dodging through straggling patches of 

 reeds until he gets high enough to feel the wind, only to again 

 start twisting, makes this, in my opinion, the most difficult form of 

 snipe shooting I know of. However, the birds make up in numbers 

 for the numerous and disheartening misses one makes on a ground 

 of this sort, and having been told by my men to expect a bag of 

 100 couple I came well supplied with ammunition. 



" Unfortunately snipe on this particular jheel do not sit well till 

 after 12 o'clock, so I began operations about 8 a.m. on another 

 stretch of equally soft and " stagnant ponk " in which I pounded 

 about till 10-30 getting 14 couple and tiring myself a good deal with 



