166 
FRANK FORESTER’S FIELD SPORTS. 
than the distinction between sixteen and fourteen tail-feathers, 
and an inch more or less in length. 
Until I saw ; the American Snipe perch in tall trees, and 
heard them cackle like laying Pullets, I regarded the differ¬ 
ence between the species as merely nominal. Every day since 
that time I have more clearly discerned its reality; and have 
in consequence learned to look for them, and find them too, 
where I should as soon have thought of hunting for an Ostrich 
as for a Snipe, in England. 
With regard to the habits of the bird in summer, I know lit- 
^tle ; but that little is enough to enable me to say that they are 
in no wise different from his autumnal customs. The Snipe 
returns to Lower Canada, from the northward, with the young 
birds full fledged in July, and is at that time, and until driven 
away by the frost, shot in immense numbers on the marshes at 
Chateau Richer, at Goose Island, and hundreds of other places 
down the St. Lawrence. Along both shores of the Great 
Northern Lakes they abound, at the same time, or a little later; 
and accordingly as the season sets in early or late, so do they 
regulate their arrival with, and departure from, us. The earli¬ 
est period at which I have ever killed migratory Snipe, birds I 
mean not bred here, is the 12th of September; when, in 1842, 
I bagged fourteen couple and a-half in a deep bog-meadow 
at Chatham. The latest day, on which I have shot them is thie 
9th of November, at Pine Brook. I have been assured, how¬ 
ever, by an excellent sportsman, on whose word I can fully 
rely, that he has killed them on a spring brook, in which the 
water never freezes in the hardest weather, daily, until the 
19th of December. This was in Orange county, moreover, 
where the frost sets in at least a fortnight earlier than it does 
below the Highlands of the Hudson. The same gentleman, 
some years since, killed thirty-five Woodcock on the 13th day 
of December; a circumstance, so far as my knowledge goes, 
unparalleled in this region. There is, however, no possible 
doubt of the fact; as, being himself aware of its strangeness, 
he took unusual pains to verify it by sufficient evidence. There 
