SPRING SNIPE SHOOTING OF 1850.
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BY HENRY WILLIAM HERBERT, AUTHOR OF “WARWICK WOODLANDS,” “MY SHOOTING BOX,” ETC.
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It is a singular thing, and one which elucidates the great research necessary, and the extreme difficulties encountered, in the attempt to establish facts of natural history with regard to birds of passage, that this beautiful little bird, the general favorite of the sportsman and the epicure, well known to all classes of men, and a visitant, in some one of its closely allied varieties, of every known nation, is still a mystery, as regards some of its habits, and continues to baffle the inquiries of the most learned and inquisitive ornithologists.
Its habits, the nature of its food, and therefore the necessities of its existence, render it an inhabitant of temperate climates, and of regions in which the moist and loamy soil, from which it derives its sustenance of small worms, insects, and the like, is not frozen during the period of its visitations so hard as to preclude its boring with its delicate and sensitive bill for its semi-aquatic prey of worms and larvæ.
Still, as extreme cold prevents it from obtaining subsistence, extreme heat would appear to be still less congenial to its tastes or temperament; for, whereas it lingers in the north until autumnal frosts seal up the marshes and the soft stream margins against its probing bill, it flies from its winter quarters in the rice-fields of Carolina and Georgia, and the farther morasses of Texas and New Mexico, the instant that opening spring admits of its return to the fresh meadows and pure rivulets of the north-east.
The winter quarters of this bird, then, are fairly ascertained, ranging from Carolina southward until almost the northern limits of the Tropics; thence, so soon as the blue-bird begins to pipe in the apple-trees, the shad to appear in the rivers, the willow-buds to turn yellow, and the frogs to croak and chirrup, with us to the northward, the snipe is seen everywhere, hurrying, according to the progress of the season, singly, in whisps of ten or twelve, or in huge flights, ever, ever, northwardly. In Maryland, in Delaware, in southern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, he is wont to appear from the 1st to the 20th of March; in New York and New Jersey northward, from the 15th of March to the 20th of April, remaining for a longer or shorter period according to the steadiness of the weather, the state of the ground as regards wet or drought, and the geniality of the season. In mild, soft, temperate, moist seasons, with a prevalence of westerly weather, he will linger with us into the lap of June; and in such seasons, more or less, he woos his mate, nidificates and rears his young among us, from the Raritan and the Passaic northward and eastward to the Great Lakes, and throughout Michigan, Wisconsin probably, and Canada west, up far into the Arctic Circles.
Still, those which breed with us in the United States, and even in the Canadas, are but as drops of water to an ocean, to those which rush on the untiring pinions moved by amatory instinct to the far breeding grounds of Labrador, Symsonia, and Boothia Felix, where it is supposed they resort to rear their young in hyperborean solitude, thence to reissue, in the summer and the earlier autumn, and re-populate our midland meadows.