JACK SNIPE 
While eating worms, grubs, and small molluscs like its larger ally, and 
occasionally minute insects, it normally adds a certain amount of vegetable 
matter to its diet. In times of stress, when the ground is frost-bound 
and the supply of animal-food is much reduced, it subsists almost en- 
tirely on grasses, moss, seeds, and other herbage, and is able to maintain 
its ordinary plump condition, when the full snipe is reduced almost to a 
skeleton. The average weight is about two ounces ; but individuals vary 
from little more than one ounce to two and a half ounces. 
Flight . — ^The leisurely and comparatively feeble flight of the jack snipe 
when flushed would scarcely lead one to suppose that it is capable of long 
and protracted migrations; but that this is so is proved by its annual 
spring- and autumn-movements. When disturbed, it flits slowly and silently 
away for about a hundred yards or less, sometimes twisting when it starts, 
and then drops suddenly to the ground as if shot. It never makes a long 
flight, and appears to have very little fear of man, for it often allows itself 
to be almost trodden on before it will rise. It is an extraordinarily 
phlegmatic bird during the day time, and is always difficult to flush a 
second time. 
Breeding habits . — In the nesting-season the jack snipe entirely changes 
its usual sluggish habits, and may then be seen gliding at a wild pace 
and at a great elevation over the marshes of Lapland and Finland. Wolley, 
who in June, 1853, was the first to obtain trustworthy information as to 
its nesting-habits, says that during its aerial evolutions it produces an 
extraordinary sound, which he likens to the noise made by a horse canter- 
ing in the distance over a hard, hollow road; it comes, he says, in fours, 
with a similar cadence, and is a clear, yet hollow, sound. It has been proved 
that the outer tail-feathers of the jack snipe are not specially developed 
to form musical instruments, like those of the common snipe, and are 
incapable of producing any sound ; there can therefore be very little doubt 
that the cantering sound described by Wolley issues from the bird’s throat, 
and is directly connected with the peculiar structure of the syrinx already 
explained. Wolley found the birds so tame on the nest that one allowed 
him to touch it with his hand before rising, and another only got up when 
he was within six inches of it. 
Nest . — ^The nests found by Wolley in the great marsh of Muonioniska, in 
Lapland, were all alike in structure, loosely made of little pieces of grass 
and equisetum not woven together, with a few old leaves of the dwarf birch. 
They were placed in a dry sedgy or grassy spot close to more open swamp. 
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