FISHERIES, GAME AND FORESTS. 263 



This performance of the snipe, though less familiar to us than many forms of love- 

 making by the birds, is of course analagous to the drumming of the ruffed grouse, and 

 the dancing of the prairie chicken, and is still more similar to the love songs of certain 

 small birds found on the prairie, sky larks and finches, which, as they have no lofty 

 perches from which they can sing, fly high into the air, and, descending slowly on 

 balanced wings, utter their song until they reach the ground. The rapid fall of the 

 snipe somewhat resembles the downward dart of the night hawk. 



The nest is a primitive affair; just a little hollow in the ground, lined with a few 

 blades of grass, in which the four eggs lie with their points all together. They are of 

 a dull clay color, dotted and splashed with large and small spots of a blackish brown. 

 The young leave the nest as soon as they are hatched, and run about after the mother, 

 as do young woodcock or young grouse — in other words, they are what the naturalists 

 call precocious (Prcecoces) . About the first of September the full-grown family turn 

 their bills southward and jog along, at first by easy stages, toward their winter home 

 in the south. Usually, most of them have passed on by the latter part of November, 

 and if any remain at this time, they are sure to be big, fat, heavy and delicious. I 

 have killed them in December, when it was quite cold and there was a thick skim of 

 ice over all the ponds, but usually the first sharp frost, by hardening the mud, closes 

 up their feeding grounds and forces them further along. Yet that it is not the cold, 

 but the lack of food, which obliges them to leave us, is shown by the fact that in many 

 places along the flanks of the Rocky Mountains and on the high plateau of the Laramie 

 plains, where in winter the mercury often falls to —30 or —40 degrees Fahrenheit, a few 

 snipe are regularly found during the winter about certain warm spring holes which 

 never freeze. That if a bird has plenty of food it does not mind a great degree of 

 cold is still further emphasized by the fact that in this same region many ducks winter 

 in all the warm pools and eddies which do not freeze. 



Snipe are notorious for the uncertainty of their appearance and for the apparently 

 causeless way in which they vanish again. No doubt the two factors which influence 

 them in these respects are the weather and the food supply. If they come into a 

 meadow which looks like a good feeding ground, and after having tested it find it 

 barren, they promptly move on to some other ground. The snipe is a voracious bird 

 like the woodcock, and the character of its food is such that it must be necessary for 

 it to eat at very frequent intervals. Its food consists very largely of earth worms 

 and insects found among the grass on the wet meadows, which it frequents. Like its 

 cousin, the woodcock, it procures the chief portion of its sustenance by "boring," that 

 is to say, by probing the soft mud with its swollen tipped, sensitive bill, by which it 

 probably feels any motion in the soil, and thus detects the presence of its food. The 

 nerves in the bill of the woodcock and snipe have been studied to some extent and 



