908 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XX. 



but that these few places are resorted to again and again, 

 by the same bird if it is missed when first put up, or by another if 

 the original occupant is killed. Hume's description of this little 

 snipe's favourite haunts cannot be improved upon, and I again 

 indent on that much-quoted author. He writes : — " Now, these 

 pet abodes have a character of their own ; they may always be 

 correctly described as corners, sometimes they are corners of paddy 

 fields, surrounded on two out of three sides by a low earthen 

 embankment ; sometimes they are in an angle formed by a little 

 scrub, or a couple of bushes, often just at the corner of a bed of 

 bulrushes or high reed ; they are always sheltered in secluded spots, 

 where the ground is thoroughly moist or marshy and where the 

 cover is pretty high." 



This curious affection for ' corners ' exhibited by the Jack Snipe 

 struck me very forcibly when shooting in Cachar. Our ground 

 was a vast expanse of rice cultivation interspersed here and there 

 with higher land, here and there with deeper pools or stretches 

 of swamp, but for the most part dead-level riceland stretching field 

 after field in every direction. In places, however, small patches of 

 land had been left uncultivated, and in these patches, generally extra 

 swampy and muddy, grew a dense, bushy grass mixed with weeds, 

 always thicker and higher near the banks which divided the un- 

 cultivated 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, sometimes 

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

 through, sometimes killing, sometimes missing. Eeturning 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 15 to 20 Jack Snipe killing about 10 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 cor- 

 ners ranning up into the higher land. 



