THE SNIPE. 
257 
It is chiefly at night that they feed; the colour of their 
plumage, consisting of various shades of brown and ochrey 
yellow, assists much in concealing them from view in the 
retired swampy places which most of the species frequent. 
The snipe in Iceland has not, in all instances, the shy- 
ness for which the species of this country is so peculiar. 
Sir George Mackenzie saw it, in 1810, ^^associating, as it 
were, with the eider ducks ; and sitting on its eggs within 
a hundred yards of the house at Yidoe"^.^^ 
The late Professor Macgillivray has thus, no less truly 
than pictorially, described the habits of several of the British 
species of this family: — ^^Who that has often visited the 
shores of the ocean, wandered along the extended sand- 
beaches, on the margin of which the waves terminate their 
career in foam and uproar, or visited the muddy estuaries, 
alternately filled and emptied by the periodical floods, has 
not stood to gaze upon the flocks of tiny birds that were 
busily picking up their food from the moist ground, or 
wheeling, as if in sport, their devious flight, now skimming 
the surface of the water, now rising high above the breakers, 
and then shooting far off to sea, to visit a distant part of the 
* Travels in Iceland, by Sir George Stewart Mackenzie, Bart. (New 
edition, p. 80.) 
S 
