this latter month and enrly in April, I have known bags to contain
actually more Jacks than full Snipe. Tickcll says : " On one
or two occasions, in very jungly places of bog and rank weeds
interspersed among rice cultivation, I have found the " Jacks"
almost monopolising the ground, to the exclusion of the Common
Snipe; but this is very rare. Commonly they are found in
the proportion of one to forty or fifty of the larger kind, and
then only in deeper cover." But I cannot say that I have anywhere
thus met with Jacks monopolising the ground earlier than
the middle of March. Perhaps in Orissa, where I have never
shot, it may be different; and Tickell goes on to say : "I think
I have met with more to the southward, on the borders of
Orissa, than in any part of Central India, on either side the
Ganges. In the Calcutta markets, where the Common Snipe
is to be seen in heaps, dead and alive, the Jacks arc seldom
to be met with. They seem to me to take to the more retired
parts of the country, such as Singhboom, where, especially in
the ' gat .parrum' (beyond the Ghauts), the rice cultivation
struggles for mastery with the swampy jungle."
He is quite wrong, however, about the Calcutta market, to
which thousands are yearly brought.
As a rule, Jacks are eminently solitary birds ; once in a way
two or three will be found together in the same corner, but
except quite towards the close of the season, when it is not
unusual to find them in parties collecting, I suppose, preparatory
to migration, even if there be half a dozen on a huge marsh,
they are all far apart.
They affect particular spots more even than do Common
Snipe. You cannot shoot continuously over any tract without
getting to know two or three places bound to hold a Jack.
You may shoot the tenant of to-day, but a week later the
place is again occupied, and so you may go on through a whole
season, finding one Jack in the self-same spot, whenever you
visit it—nay at times you may kill one bird in the morning at
one of these pet haunts, and find another there waiting to be
bagged as you return in the evening. Granted, that you find
many more Jacks lying about in chance places, where you have
not before seen one, and where, probably, you do not again
find one, or at any rate till long afterwards, but my belief
is, that these outlying Snipes know, in some way of their own,
of all these " eminently desirable residences," and are always
on the look-out to pop into any one of them the moment it
becomes vacant.
Now, these pet abodes have a character of their own;
they may always be correctly described as corners ; sometimes
they are corners of paddy fields surrounded, on two out of
three sides, by a low, earthen embankment ; sometimes they are
in an angle formed by a little scrub; or a couple of bushes,
often just at the corner of a bed of bulrushes or high reed ;
they are always sheltered and secluded spots, where the ground
is thoroughly moist or marshy, and where the cover is pretty
high. It is just the same at home as here, and I used to
know a particular corner in an osier bed in Sommcrton, where,
if there were any Jack in the county, one was certain to be
found.
At all times, Jack are much more attached to good cover
than the Common Snipe, and to good, wet, marshy soil than the
Pintail. I never found them on the almost bare mud banks,
which constantly attract the former, and very rarely in the
dry cover, which the latter so often affect. TickelPs remarks on
this point are most just. He says: "The Jack Snipe is much
less numerous in India than the ordinary Snipe, and appears
more restricted in its choice of locality. It is found in much
the same haunts as the latter, but always in deeper cover,
where grass and weeds, springing up in the semi-fluid mud,
intermix with the stubble of the paddy fields,"
They lie extremely close, suffering you, at times, almost
to crush them with your foot, before they will rise, and very
often allowing themselves to be captured by a cunning old retriever.
Indeed, without dogs, it is impossible to make sure of
getting up all the birds there are ; but they have a strong scent,
and no good dog will pass one, and it is having shot so much
to dogs that makes me assert as above (in opposition to
Dresser and his authorities,) that, except towards the close of
the season, Jacks in India are normally solitary in their habits.
They rise noiselessly, and as Tickell says : " Its flight is slower
than that of the Common Snipe, fluttering and feeble. When
flushed, it proceeds at no great height from the ground, and in
a vacillating way, as if every moment about to settle. It then
either drops suddenly, as if dead, or gives a little shoot into
the air first, and then falls, as it were, to the ground. When
once alighted it squats, so that no bird is more easy to mark ;
indeed, one may know almost the very blade of grass it will
spring from when flushed again.'"
But though perhaps its flight may be (and it certainly looks)
somewhat slower than that of the Pintail, it is so irregular and
balking, that, although probably one of the easiest birds in the
world to shoot, if you reserve your fire till the proper moment,
it is constantly missed through over-eagerness, and all kinds of
apocryphal stories are told of gentlemen enjoying a whole
season's sport, a dozen or twenty shots daily, off one Jack,
until some blundering friend spoilt the arrangement by killing
this solitary, but prolific, source of enjoyment. As a matter
of fact, no decent shot is likely to miss it twice running ; and,
as it always drops within a hundred yards, and waits exactly
where it drops for you to flush it again within ten yards, very
few poor Jacks, once seen by sportsmen, ever survive their first
interview with mankind, at any rate in India. Possibly, like