THE JACK SNIPE. a7 
they are always sheltered and secluded spots, where the ground 
is thoroughly moist or marshy, and where the cover is pretty 
high. It is just the same at home as here, and I used to 
know a particular corner in an osier bed in Sommerton, where, 
if there were any Jack in the county, one was certain to be 
found. 
At all times, Jack are much more attached to good cover 
than the Common Snipe, and to good, wet, marshy soil than the 
Pintail. I never found them on the almost bare mud banks, 
which constantly attract the former, and very rarely in the 
dry cover, which the latter so often affect. Tickell’s remarks on 
this point are most just. He says: “The Jack Snipe is much 
less numerous in India than the ordinary Snipe, and appears 
more restricted in its choice of locality. It is found in much 
the same haunts as the latter, but always in deeper cover, 
where grass and weeds, springing up in the semi-fluid mud, 
intermix with the stubble of the paddy fields.” 
They lie extremely close, suffering you, at times, almost 
to crush them with your foot, before they will rise, and very 
often allowing themselves to be captured by a cunning old retrie- 
ver. Indeed, without dogs, it is impossibleto make sure of 
getting up all the birds there are; but they havea strong scent, 
and no good dog will pass one, and it is having shot so much 
to dogs that makes me assert as above (in opposition to 
Dresser and his authorities,) that, except towards the close of 
the season, Jacks in India are normally solitary in their habits. 
They rise noiselessly, and as Tickell says : “ Its flight is slower 
than that of the Common Snipe, fluttering and feeble. When 
flushed, it proceeds at no great height from the ground, and in 
a vacillating way, as if every moment about to settle. It then 
either drops suddenly, as if dead, or gives a little shoot into 
the air first, and then falls, as it were, to the ground. When 
once alighted it squats, so that no bird is more easy to mark ; 
indeed, one may know almost the very blade of grass it will 
spring from when flushed again.” 
But though perhaps its flight may de (and it certainly looks) 
somewhat slower than that of the Pintail, it is so irregular and 
balking, that, although probably one of the easiest birds in the 
world to shoot, if you reserve your fire till the proper moment, 
it is constantly missed through over-eagerness, and all kinds of 
apocryphal stories are told of gentlemen enjoying a whole 
season’s sport, a dozen or twenty shots daily, off one Jack, 
until some blundering friend spoilt the arrangement by killing 
this solitary, but prolific, source of enjoyment. As a matter 
of fact, no decent shot is likely to miss it twice running; and, 
as it always drops within a hundred yards, and waits exactly 
where it drops for you to flush it again within ten yards, very 
few poor Jacks, once seen by sportsmen, ever survive their first 
interview with mankind, at any rate in India. Possibly, like 
Leh 
