248 MANUAL FOR YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 
unfledged and incapable of taking wing; but in July cock- 
shooting, in Orange County, I have more than once shot 
young birds of the season, with the pin-feathers not yet 
fully grown, which must have been bred on the ground. 
In wild, windy weather, particularly on their first 
coming, and when the season is uncertain with interrupted 
night frosts and hail showers, snipe often rise in whisps, 
as it is termed, or little knots of ten or twenty birds, 
when they invariably fly wild and high, and often leave 
the ground entirely, soaring up and going away directly 
out of sight. 
At a later period, when the weather is hot, and when 
the breeding season is at hand, the birds have a trick of 
rising perpendicularly into the air, and then letting them- 
selves drop a hundred feet plumb down through the air, 
with the quills of their wings set edgewise, making a 
strange sound, which once heard cannot be mistaken, and 
is known as drumming. This is, beyond doubt, an amor- 
ous manifestation, like the strutting and cooing of pigeons, 
the shuffling and wing-fluttering of game-cocks, and the 
tail-displaying of peacocks and turkeys; nor do I know a 
sound of worse omen to the sportsman; since, at these 
moments, the birds are inconceivably wild, calling one 
another up, until all in the neighborhood, or within sound, 
are wheeling and gyrating in the air like tumbler pigeons, 
and playing all sorts of fantastic tricks such as well-disposed 
snipe would never dream of at any other season, sometimes 
alighting on rail-fences or tall trees, and chattering like 
hens which have laid an egg. 
At such times, there is little or no hope for it, except 
