To the Point: The Case for Snipe

From our January/February 2025 issue

One hundred twenty-five years ago, a Louisiana land baron named J.J. Pringle published Twenty Years of Snipe Shooting. Pringle’s book details how, from 1867 to 1887, he killed 78,602 snipe—including 366 birds in a single day—from the Gulf marshlands, an unconscionable deed given today’s standards. Driven to known “sniperies” in a horse-drawn wagon by his servant, Pringle shot hand-loaded double guns and walked up his quarry with pointing dogs, to keep undisturbed birds from flushing early.

Other market gunners also targeted the Wilson’s snipe, aka the jacksnipe and gutter snipe. Chesapeake Bay hunters sometimes put out wooden-stilt decoys on sand spits or mud flats in stools that attracted “wisps” of 100 or more snipe at a time. A Barnegat Bay market hunter reported killing 54 when he touched off both barrels of his 8-gauge gun. To my mind, those old-timers missed the supreme challenge of trying to hit airborne snipe, one bird at a time.

No gamebird I know is smaller than a snipe and harder to bag. Snipe turn and twist (“jink”) like bats but fly as though escaping Hell itself. A woodcock typically flutters up and away in a corkscrew gyration meant to dodge brush and limbs until reaching the canopy, where it hovers a second and offers a relatively easy shot. The more agile snipe doesn’t hover at all; it streaks for the nearest opening and you shoot at the blur.

Found throughout the world, snipe breed across North America—from Alaska to Newfoundland and as far south as California, the lower Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic states. Wintering range reaches from the southern US to northern South America. The Gulf Coast of southern Louisiana is one of the best places to hunt these winter migrants.

Years ago friends and I shot snipe while slogging through drained ricefields near Gueydan, Louisiana. One day while hunting under a sky the color of old dishwater, I learned how the birds flushed low, barely skimming the coastal prairie grass, and made queer scape-scape sounds until they lifted up to become zig-zagging flecks of pepper. By the time I identified an incoming flock, the brief shooting window had closed. The few birds I shot were from bunches that swooped back overhead, their collective wings roaring like a sudden blast of shower water.

My notes attest: That day 10 gunners shot 38 snipe, with scant shells left from a 500-round case of No. 9 shot. That’s a lot of ammo for a tiny bird whose arrowhead-shaped breast offers a mere two bites when cooked. Served in a Cajun-style gumbo, however, they are mighty-fine bites.