CASPER — His boots squished in the muck as Chris Madsen trudged through the marsh along the edge of a large pond. He stopped and looked around at the wetlands that stretched for miles in between the farmlands of southeast Wyoming.
Madsen looked down at his muddy boots. He was walking right where a snipe hunter needed to be.
“As a rule of thumb if you’re walking and you hear splish-splash under your feet, you’re too deep. If you hear swish-swish, you’re too shallow. But if you hear this,” he said, stepping up and down in the squishy mud, “you’re probably just about right.” Yes, he was on a snipe hunt.
No, really. Snipe.
Seriously, he’s not kidding.
Madsen is one of a very small but enthusiastic handful of hunters who happily pursue snipe — a short-legged, long billed migratory bird of the high marsh.
More than a century ago, the snipe was a popular gamebird among American and European hunters at a time when it was considered excellent table fare.
The snipe’s reputation as an elusive quarry probably contributed to the practical joke that developed years later.
You know the old prank. Take a first-time camper out into the woods at night. A flashlight and pillow case in his hand, you tell him to start calling for snipe — making some silly noise you’ve taught him — and that the snipe will run toward the light and right into the bag.
As he makes his ridiculous snipe calls, you and your buddies tell him you’re going to go kick some snipe out of the brush, so you leave him out there alone until he figures out that he’s been duped, or, “left holding the bag” as the saying goes.
The snipe, however, is no mythical creature. It’s a real bird.
Similar in appearance to an American woodcock of eastern states, the common snipe inhabits the marshes of western North America and Eurasia while its cousin, the jack snipe, inhabits Europe and Asia.
The common snipe breeds in northern climes and travels south in the winter just like ducks and geese do, although it can tolerate severe wintry weather.
The snipe is a small, quick target for shotgunners. When it flushes, it typically flies low over the marsh weaving back and forth in a zigzag. The difficulty in hitting one with a shot led to the British term, “sniper,” for a marksman.
Continuing on his snipe hunt, Madsen walked a few paces through the swampy vegetation when suddenly a small blur streaked over the marsh right in front of him. Making a startling scraping sound — screep, screep, screep — as it flew, it bobbed and weaved at lightning speed.
Caught a little off-guard, Madsen swung his shotgun off his shoulder and in the bird’s direction.
He fired.
The bird kept on flying. He’d missed.
Laughing, he loaded another round in the gun and continued walking through the marsh.
“It’s like hunting supercharged woodcock,” he said, shaking his head, still chuckling.
He soon jumped another one. That time he was ready and he dropped the streaking bird in a single shot.
He walked over and picked it up, admiring its mottled, tan-colored feathers that are perfect camouflage and its long beak designed for probing deep into the mud for worms, crustaceans and other delicacies of the swamp.
The bird was the first of six Madsen put “in the bag” that afternoon — a very good day as snipe hunting goes, given how tough the zippy little rockets are to hit. With all the missed shots of a typical snipe hunt, a hunter could easily go through a box or two of shotgun shells trying to bag the legal daily limit of eight birds.
Another tricky aspect of snipe hunting is making sure what you’re shooting at is actually a snipe and not a federally protected migratory bird, such as a dowitcher, explained Madsen, who lives in Cheyenne where he works as a magazine editor for the Wyoming Department of Game and Fish.
Hold your fire if the bird has white on its back, he said. It might be a dowitcher. Also listen for that telltale scraping sound a snipe makes when it flushes, although it doesn’t always make that sound.
Snipe hunting isn’t easy. It’s nonstop walking on a wet, smelly bog through swarms of biting mosquitoes, prickly vegetation and other hazards akin to swamps.
One thing about snipe, he said, is that although he and some hunters consider them excellent meat for eating, they’re tiny — smaller than a dove.
“It’s not a lot of meat,” he said.
That might explain, at least in part, why snipe hunting isn’t exactly a popular sport among wingshooters. But it wasn’t always that way.
Snipe hunting is a throwback to early America. A cookbook from the early 20th century wasn’t complete without snipe and woodcock recipes. Snipe and other wading birds and shorebirds were once hotly pursued game for their meat until the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 shut down all hunting for them.
The act was a much-needed measure at the time when birds populations were being decimated by the commercial trade of feathers and birds. Hunting seasons were allowed again decades later for snipe and some other migratory birds.
“When they opened it back up again, the interest had just died.
Essentially that was two generations of hunters who just didn’t have a chance to hunt them,” Madsen said. “It’s a classic case of the extinction of a tradition of hunting. In the latter part of the 19th century, with snipe and a lot of those shorebirds, there was a real enthusiasm for hunting them.”
Several old snipe recipes call for cooking the birds whole — head, beak, feet, guts and all.
“The guts were called ‘the trail.’ They were considered a delicacy. I keep telling myself that one of these days I’m going to try it,” Madsen said.
Most snipe hunters, such as Madsen, cook the breast meat grilled with vegetables or in a gumbo. The meat tastes a lot like dove.
Depending on how it’s cooked though, it can be a little gamier tasting than duck though similar in texture. The gaminess turns some people off to it.
“They’re dark meat so a lot of people I know who have shot one or two and eaten them ended up saying, ‘Nah, I’m just not up for that,’ ” Madsen said.
Another reason snipe aren’t popular among bird hunters is that gun dogs don’t seem to like the way they smell, he said. While dogs love to retrieve ducks and pheasants, they usually don’t get too birdy about picking up a snipe.
“It takes an unusual bird dog that will enthusiastically hunt snipe,” Madsen said.
It takes an unusual hunter too. It never fails, Madsen said. People always think he’s kidding when he says he’s going snipe hunting.
“Invariably it’s a shock when I mention snipe hunting. Their response is always, ‘Yeah, holding the bag, right?’ ”
Yep, some old jokes never die.
