The year that The Beatles released their first LP, two schoolboys—one shotgun between them—walked a Northumbrian ditch bank. Suddenly a long-billed little bird sprang into the air, jinking to and fro as it rose. “Shoot!” shouted the unarmed boy.
“What is it?” called the other.
“Shoot!” By then the bird’s flight had leveled, presenting a comfortable shot. The bird dropped like a plumb bob, bouncing on the soft turf. I had killed my first snipe.
Since then I have become something of a snipe geek, gallivanting about the globe and shooting them in South Africa, South America and the US. In the early days I knew nothing. Snipeare stubby little jobbies cloaked in a half-dozen shades of brown with cigarette beaks and an almost worldwide distribution of 18 species; but they were rare winter visitors on the dairy farms where I shot partridge in my youth. I set out to learn more and discovered the little blighters were plentiful wherever there was mud.
Perhaps because snipe are so common, sports have been enjoying hunting and writing about them since the development of the two-barreled shotgun. From Ireland’s West Coast to the bayous of Louisiana, more ink has been spilled about snipe than any other gamebird. Nowhere was this literary tradition larger than in British India, where the word “sniper” apparently originated in the 1770s among the Empire’s soldiers who hunted the little birds.
Although snipe are most often walked up, they also can be taken over decoys—such as these hand-painted examples. Photo courtesy of Chris Shipley Photography.
“It will, I think, be generally conceded that the snipe holds pride of place among Indian game birds,” wrote C.A. Rivaz (known as “Raoul”) in 1912. Reasons offered were as relevant today as they were more than a century ago: no crowds, no competition and minimal gear required. Raoul pointed to the inexpensive nature of the sport: “To those who cannot afford big-game shooting or pigsticking, snipe shooting is by far the most attractive and at the same time inexpensive of sports in Bengal.” I have to admit that, previous to reading this, I hadn’t considered pig-sticking a serious alternative to wingshooting, but it did give me pause. British India was not classless—rank and privilege operated within colonial society—but anyone with the price of a 12-bore could hunt birds.
All the man of modest means needed apparently was a “boxlock gun of 12 or 14 bore with a goodly supply of No. 8 or No. 9 cartridges, a couple of coolies to flush the birds, a couple more to bring the ammunition and bird sticks and a fifth to carry the necessary refreshments”—which in the case of Raoul meant copious bottles of Bass beer.
OK, so not every piece of information in the old guides was relevant, but the references did speak to me at some level, communicating knowledge few of my friends had. They were glorious resources and offered incredible insight into wingshooting lore, and the enthusiasts who wrote them knew their business better than any living sportsman today. Those books with their tattered covers inspired me to learn more.
And learn more I did. This from Douglas Dewar writing in The Sportsman Birds of India: “. . . a bird is not a game bird unless it fulfils two conditions. It must be good to eat and difficult to shoot.” The snipe, with its zig-zagging takeoff and ruby breast meat, is both a wingshooter’s challenge and a gastronome’s delight. It is generally accepted that the legs do little work during the snipe’s life and are therefore most tender. I have met bird hunters who prefer domestic poultry over wild game, but snipe on a tranche of toast liberally troweled with foie gras is for the angels.
The author sometimes enjoys good shooting by setting up in an area where snipe have previously congregated. Photo courtesy of Chris Shipley Photography.
I have tried and failed to spot the sporting differences between common, Wilson’s, Magellan’s and Ethiopian snipe. To me they are equally challenging. Hoping to add another notch to my gun, I once showed an African PH a color plate from Maj. Boyd Horsbrugh’s The Game-Birds & Water-Fowl of South Africa that featured something called a painted snipe. The bird in question has a body and bill familiar to every snipe hunter but a color scheme that appears to have been created by the artist LeRoy Neiman. I fancied a stuffed specimen would look splendid on the chimney piece in my gunroom. My white hunter explained that taking the particular species was proscribed, but he could apply for a “collectors permit” to secure a single example, if I was adamant. While mulling this over, we actually stumbled upon one of the birds. Rarely have I been so disappointed, for it flew like a seagull and would have presented the easiest of shots.
Where I live in the Pacific Northwest, Wilson’s snipe (Gallinago delicata) are the only species that proliferate. Named for Alexander Wilson, the true father of American ornithology who identified the birds as a distinct species as early as 1808, they fly like demented fruit bats at speeds up to 60 miles per hour. For the past two centuries Wilson’s snipe have been acknowledged by American sportsmen for their challenging qualities as gamebirds as well as tasty treats.
Before the creation of levees along the Atchafalaya River forever altered the nature of the Teche waterway in Louisiana, a fellow named James J. Pringle killed 6,615 Wilson’s snipe in one season and claimed a lifetime bag of 69,087. But what was once a brag is now odious. Today’s sportsmen are satisfied with modest bags—perhaps just enough for hors d’oeuvres with a glass of Bordeaux before a sumptuous main course.
I have shot snipe a good deal in the Pacific Northwest, where we are fortunate to have a reasonable resident population and a season that runs concurrent with the long duck season. A chap willing to buy licenses in both Oregon and Washington can shoot a combined daily limit of more than a dozen birds. A fellow I once knew named Grant Beauchamp told me of a place on the Oregon coast that just hotched with snipe. We duly drove to the spot, parked the rig and walked out onto a featureless tidal flat. The hunting was good, but as the day drew on the birds flushed farther and farther away. Grant was one shy of a limit and decided to take a Hail Mary at a long bird. To our amazement, the little fellow dropped. We walked out, and Grant threw his cap on the ground in the time-honored manner of a man who has only the broadest idea of where his bird fell. We searched in vain. When we gave up, Grant picked up his cap and found the dead snipe beneath it.
To hunt snipe successfully, it’s best to learn a little of the bird’s ways. In late spring and early summer, snipe soaring and dipping, tailfeathers thrumming in display, can be heard above the sound of the wind in many a wet spot. Locating nesting snipe in spring can lead to finding resident birds in the fall.
However, snipe, like all migratory species, can be here today and gone tomorrow. They breed across northern North America and winter from the southern US through Central America to Venezuela. Many of our eastern Washington snipe are short-distance migrants, leaving by Christmas; but a few usually remain throughout the winter.
When trying to locate birds, look for wet, well-trodden cow pastures. I have a brilliant spot that blossoms just before Christmas when the migration is in full swing. One of our local farm families owns a property with a large field featuring an underground spring that bubbles up at its center. On frosty mornings when standing water freezes, not only does this little rill continue to percolate, but it also steams slightly, warmed by subterranean geothermal activity. At such times the field becomes a snipe mecca. Bovine hooves churning their meadow muffins into the water’s edge create the perfect environment for the snipe’s invertebrate food, and the area heaves with our little pals. More and more this type of area is being fenced for the benefit of gamefish. Fences can prevent livestock and their waste from entering waterways, which can reduce erosion, pollution and the spread of waterborne diseases. But what is bad for trout is good for snipe.
Multiple hunting methods are another of snipe shooting’s attractions, but walking up is perhaps the most common. If you have a choice, it’s perhaps best to walk into the wind, which can result in closer shots. Snipe, like most birds, get more lift when rising into a breeze. I’m sometimes quizzed whether it’s better to shoot immediately as the birds rise or to wait until the twisting-turning flight ceases. The likely answer is that the correct method is that which best suits the individual. The young chap in a hurry with an open-choke gun will knock over his bird quickly, while the wily veteran often will recite “snipe on toast” before even shouldering his shotgun. It’s simply a question of what works for you.
Photo courtesy of Chris Shipley Photography.
No bird is more difficult to drive than the snipe, but I have seen it done well (and badly) in that land of mire, mist and midges: Ireland. Much depends on whether the snipe are “in,” because there are fewer places more desolate than an Irish bog without an avian presence. On a couple of occasions I have had the pleasure of shooting driven snipe with an excellent crew of beaters close to Cong in an area perched between County Mayo and County Galway. In truth we had mixed results, because when the snipe spotted the line of Guns, they flared and became too high to shoot; but when the Guns were placed behind a hedge and the beaters started close enough to the firing line, the results were excellent.
What the murmuration is to the starling, the “whisp” is to the snipe. Both are onomatopoeic collective nouns formed from a sound associated with the particular species. All snipe hunters are familiar with the scaipe sound of a single flushing bird, but only those who shoot them during the migration will know the whish of a dozen speedy snipe circling a prospective feeding spot.
When a whisp of snipe is on the wing and the lead bird breaks to the left or right, the rest will often follow. When this phenomenon is observed, it’s time to break out the decoys. I own a few craft-made, hand-painted decoys by duck-call maker Ralph Yeager and the late artist David Hagerbaumer that I press into service sparingly, if only because they are so beautiful.
Look for the shallow end of a shrinking pond where white splashes and probed mud indicate the presence of snipe. The best indications of snipe, however, are the snipe themselves. Set your decoys in spots where you flush birds. Snipe will not decoy where they don’t want to be, but often they will fall back into an area where they have previously congregated. Hide within range and wait. I sit on an upturned bucket that I use to ferry my decoys to my hunting spots.
I had a day in mid-December last year that was particularly memorable. The weather was cool but not cold enough to freeze. As I walked out to an area that had traditionally held birds, a whisp of snipe swooshed past and landed at the edge of a slowly receding pond. They flushed as I approached, and I managed to drop one. The rest took off in the direction of a more-permanent pond that has its own duck blind. An impassable stream separated the ponds, and it took a while to relocate the birds by an inconvenient and distant bridge. As I approached, the snipe flushed in a more scattered formation and flew back to the first pond. I realized that I could potentially hunt them back and forth between the ponds if I didn’t have to go the long way around via the bridge. I returned to the car, picked up my decoys and laid an ambuscade at the first pond, which I guessed was the more snipe-friendly. Unable to flush the birds from the second pond, I gambled that they would eventually return to the favored first spot on their own. It turned out that I was right. Through the course of the afternoon I enjoyed perhaps my best-ever American snipe shoot.
No magazine feature about shooting snipe, regardless of the method employed, can be complete without a word about the difficulties of hitting the little blighters. Typically, success is measured in the ratio of birds bagged to cartridges expended; so I am going to let a humorous story from K.S. Verdad illustrate how many shells are required to bring to bag 124 snipe.
Writing about snipe shooting on India’s Northwest frontier in the January 1931 issue of Game & Gun Magazine, Verdad wrote: “Sixty-two couple of snipe to two guns in three hours; a good morning’s work with which we are very well satisfied . . . . We are just ready to drive off when we see the headman of the village, a retired Indian officer of the local Militia hurrying towards us to make his salaams. With the charming courtesy of the Mohammedan countryman, he apologies for the behavior of the youth who so nearly shot us earlier in the day and enquires after our health, our houses and our sport. He gasps incredulously when he hears the number of birds that have fallen to our guns; but then, alas, he forgets himself. Perhaps it is the sternly practical Militia training that has blunted the finer edges of his native perception; but just as the car is about to move off, he can contain himself no longer and calls out: ‘Sahib, how many cartridges . . . ?’ I tread heavily on the low-gear pedal and allow a more than usually noisy pre-war Ford to save the situation. But what a tactless question!”
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