UPLAND SHOOTING. 
139 
the winter has been uncertain open and variable, and when the 
months of January and February have been, as was the case in 
1843, unusually mild and genial, there is, as it were, no spring 
at all, winter lingering into the lap of June. In the year above 
mentioned, the ground was white with snow in Philadelphia on 
the first of that month. 
In the former of these two kinds of spring, the Snipe compose 
themselves for a long sojourn, lie well to the dog, grow very fat 
and lazy, and defer their departure till the weather becomes so 
warm and dry as to render their migration a matter of necessity. 
As an example of this, in the spring of 1836 I drove from New 
York into Orange county, on the 10th of April, in a sleigh, over 
deep snow; and, within a week afterward, and thence up to the 
10th of June, shot Snipe in abundance in New Jersey, both at 
Chatham and Pine Brook, on the Passaic. 
In the latter there is sometimes no spring shooting at all; the 
birds merely alighting in whisps or small parties, from five to 
twenty in number, remaining a single day, and then off again 
Northward, with no tarrying. 
For several years, latterly, spring Snipe-shooting has been so 
indifferent, that few sportsmen have followed it, and that the mar¬ 
kets have been badly supplied. 
The arrival, however, of the Snipe in New Jersey—in South¬ 
ern New York there is little good Snipe-ground—varies from the 
tenth of March, which is the earliest date at which I have ever 
seen them plentiful on the Upland meadows, to the fifteenth of 
April. If they have not arrived at the latter of these dates, it 
may generally be taken for granted, that the year will have no 
spring Snipe-shooting. 
It must be observed that obtaining great sport in spring Snipe¬ 
shooting must always, to those who do not reside immediately on 
the ground, be more or less a matter of good fortune; since it is 
not above once, in five or six years, that these birds come on and 
stajr under such favorable circumstances, as cause them to settle, as 
it is termed, to the ground ; and, when this is not the case, succes¬ 
sive flights arriving, tarrying for a few days and passing onward 
