SNIPES, SANDPIPERS, ETC.: WILSON SNIPE 
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and on December 22, 1915, was seen on Cuchillo Creek (Ligon); it was seen occa¬ 
sionally on the Carlsbad Bird Reserve in January, 1915 (Willett). [It also winters 
at Albuquerque (Leopold, 1919).] 
In the spring migration it was noted on the Mimbres in March, 1913 (Rockhill); 
at Chloride April, 1912, and April 25, 1915; at Mayberry Lake about 60 miles west of 
Magdalena on April 26, 1913; and one seen May 6,1913, at Palomas Springs (Ligon). 
lit has also been noted, April 15, 1923, 20 miles east of Silver City (Kellogg) 1. 
W. W. Cooke. 
Nest. —A depression in grass or moss in partly moist ground, sometimes in the 
center of a tussock. Eggs: 3 to 4, olive, clay color or brownish ashy, heavily marked 
with chocolate, chiefly around the larger end, and usually also with sharp scratchy 
lines. 
Food. —Largely worms, larvae of flies, dragon flies, and other insects; small 
caterpillars, ants, black crickets, locusts, grasshoppers, mosquitoes, crane flies, 
spiders, the predaceous diving beetles that make trouble in fish hatcheries; snails, 
shrimps, crawfish, univalves; seeds and the slender roots of aquatic plants. 
General Habits.— The Jack' Snipe is a bird of fresh-water swamps 
and meadows and their weedy or bushy borders, among whose sticks 
and grasses, as Abbott Thayer points out, his striped and mottled 
form is obliterated by counter-shading and a picture pattern of sticks 
and grasses and their shadows. 
Here he walks easily about, as Mr. Eaton describes it, “thrusting 
and probing in the soft oozy soil for worms, grubs, soft roots, and 
seeds, which constitute his favorite food. When his foes appear he 
crouches so motionless that it is impossible to distinguish him among 
the grasses, and when too closely pressed springs suddenly into the 
air with a sharp grating call and makes rapidly off in a ‘rail-fence 
course not far above the ground until well out of danger, when he mounts 
high in the air and circles about for a few minutes finally to pitch 
headlong again” (1909, p. 302). The probings of the Jack Snipe make 
the ground look in places as if “drilled with holes.” They are so 
characteristic that hunters do not look for Snipe except where the 
probings are found. When walking about the borders of pools in plain 
sight, Doctor Wetmore says, “their short legs, long bills and heavy 
bodies give them a somewhat grotesque appearance” (1927b, p. 358). 
One of the birds that we flushed near Carlsbad rose with its explosive 
zeep-zeep-zeep and dropped into a field across the fence. Another that 
we flushed from under the weeds in a prairie-dog field went whizzing 
over to a bare spot by an irrigation ditch where it was so nearly the 
color of the ground that it looked like a dark brown ball and we had to 
walk near to make out the long bill that restored the bird form. 
An autumn whistling note of the Wilson Snipe, delivered high in 
the sky, has been described by Mr. Aldo Leopold as consisting of 
“six or seven mellow whistling notes, all run together, each of the 
same low pitch,” suggesting “ one of the Loon’s calls heard at a distance 
(1927, p. 79). 
