Even though I don't know one person who has ever been duped into going into the deep woods and trying to call fictitious critters into a burlap bag, everyone seems to have that exact image in their head of snipe hunting.
Just so we're clear, snipe, or common snipe is a bird that looks a lot like a woodcock. The best way to tell them apart in the hand is by looking at the stripes on the head. The stripes on a snipe go front to back; the stripes on the head of a woodcock go from "ear" to "ear." In the air, the snipe's wings have a bent shape that remind one of the flight of a killdeer.
I look at the Michigan hunting regulations every year and see the daily bag limit of eight birds and think "I'd like to get a piece of that action." I spent several days with Andy Ammann, a man who came as close to achieving rock star status as any wildlife biologist, when he was in his 80s in the early 1990s. We were trying to locate broods of snipe so he could band the chicks. Since passed to happier hunting grounds, no doubt filled with young aspen coverts, Dr. Ammann is credited with getting a December grouse hunting season in Michigan, and for developing the technique to locate and band woodcock chicks using pointing dogs as a way of gathering important life cycle information to help in regulating the hunting of the secretive birds. I believe there is a Ruffed Grouse Society chapter named after Dr. Ammann. (I should check online to see if any of his books titled A Guide to Capturing and Banding American Woodcock Using Pointing Dogs are available.) We never found any chicks together, but he did assure me the birds are sporty hunting and plentiful in Michigan, especially along certain shorelines of the Great Lakes.
Finally, last season, approximately 18 years after my conversations with Dr. Ammann, I bagged my first snipe. Regrettably I never have targeted the species, or even tried to find those shorelines where they are plentiful. (It's still my intention to do so some year.) However, I couldn't have been happier than that fortuitousness moment last season when pheasant hunting a farm near my home when my dogs bumped a snipe that flew in front of me.
Normally when pheasant hunting you can't pull the trigger on a snipe. They are a migratory bird and you cannot hunt them with a gun capable of holding more than three shells. No problem for me, as I usually tote an over/under on pheasant hunts. Like ducks, snipe require the use of non-tox shot loads. Luckily, I had run out of my normal lead pheasant shells. On this tromp through the small farm marsh, I happened to be loaded up with steel shot duck loads which I have found to be effective on the big, long-tailed upland birds. The loads were No. 4 steel shot, which would not be recommended for the diminutive snipe, but legal nonetheless.
So my first snipe got posed with one of my dogs and a rooster pheasant I also took on that hunt. It's the photo posted on my Bird Country Reports blog and Twitter account. In order to see it you would need to click to view the larger version of the photo, and even then you would be doing great if you spotted the little bird in the photo next to the gaudy ring-neck. If you look closely at the photo I put below here you may notice part of the bill missing and hole about the size of a No. 4 steel shot pellet on the remaining portion of the bill.
Close up photo of common snipe:
Here are woodcock in a photo for comparison to the snipe:
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