376 THE JACK SNIPE. 
this latter month and early in April, I have known bags to contain 
actually ore Jacks than full Snipe. Tickell says: “On one 
or two occasions, in very jungly places of bog and rank weeds 
interspersed among rice cultivation, I have found the “ Jacks” 
almost monopolising the ground, to the exclusion of the Common 
Snipe; but this is very rare. Commonly they are found in 
the proportion of one to forty or fifty of the larger kind, and 
then only in deeper cover.” But I cannot say that I have any- 
where thus met with Jacks monopolising the ground earlier than 
the middle of March. Perhaps in Orissa, where I have never 
shot, it may be different ; and Tickell goes on to say: “I think 
I have met with more to the southward, on the borders of 
Orissa, than in any part of Central India, on either side the 
Ganges. In the Calcutta markets, where the Common Snipe 
is to be seen in heaps, dead and alive, the Jacks are seldom 
to be met with. They seem to me to take to the more retired 
parts of the country, such as Singhboom, where, especially in 
the ‘gat parrum’ (beyond the Ghauts), the rice cultivation 
struggles for mastery with the swampy jungle.” 
He is quite wrong, however, about the Calcutta market, to 
which thousands are yearly brought. 
As a rule, Jacks are eminently solitary birds; once in a way 
two or three will be found together in the same corner, but 
except quite towards the close of the season, when it is not 
unusual to find them in parties collecting, I suppose, preparatory 
to migration, even if there be half a dozen on a huge marsh, 
they are all far apart. 
They affect particular spots more even than do Common 
Snipe. You cannot shoot continuously over any tract without 
getting to know two or three places bound to hold a Jack. 
You may shoot the tenant of to-day, but a week later the 
place is again occupied, and so you may go on through a whole 
season, finding one Jack in the self-same spot, whenever you 
visit it—nay at times you may kill one bird in the morning at 
one of these pet haunts, and find another there waiting to be 
bagged as you return in the evening. Granted, that you find 
many more Jacks lying about in chance places, where you have 
not before seen one, and where, probably, you do not again 
find one, or at any rate till long afterwards, but my belief 
is, that these outlying Snipes know, in some way of their own, 
of all these “eminently desirable residences,” and are always 
on the look-out to pop into any one of them the moment it 
becomes vacant. 
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 ; 
