Past, present intertwine in snipe hunt

Three snipe erupted from the wet prairie like loosed bottle rockets shed of their stabilizing sticks, twisting and turning, changing speed, direction and altitude with, it seemed, each beat of their blurred wings.

Even when expected, the explosive rise of snipe and the accompanying high-pitched scraping call is a jarring and astonishing thing when it happens 10 yards in front of you, and I hesitated just a heartbeat as much out of being startled as by design. The involuntary delay proved provident. It usually does with snipe.

"I think (snipe) are the hardest birds in the world to hit. They fly like a corkscrew for the first twenty-five feet or so, and then they level off and double their speed. This is confusing till you get used to it," wrote Forest McNeir, a man who knew about such things and who, along with snipe and history and wetlands and their significance, was much on my mind this day.

The trick, McNeir and so many other great snipe gunners knew, is to not try getting on the bird as soon as it flushes - it'll just tie you in knots. Wait until the snipe gets all that twisting and turning and shifting speed and direction out of its system, then, if it's still in range, make your move. But make it quick. And even then, the bird is far from in the bag.

"Don't ever let anybody tell you he doesn't miss when shooting jacksnipe - most of them do, most of the time," McNeir wrote 60 years ago, when he was 80 and penned his autobiography, "Forest McNeir of Texas."

Direct connections

A second after I mounted the worn Wingmaster and the barrel finally, somehow, found and began trying to track the closest of the fast-departing trio, the bird's erratic flight straightened a bit. The bird tumbled at the shot, its fall marked by a slight splash in the thin sheet of water covering much of the fallow pasture gone threadbare from winter's wear.

I walked the 30 yards or so to the spot, reached down, picked up the long-billed shorebird, admiring its feathers that seem from a distance to be simple dull brown and white but, up close, are complex, variegated works of art. Then, carefully and with a thankfulness and a respect non-hunters may never understand, I placed the snipe in the back of the game vest.

Standing there in the late afternoon of a crystalline February day, I watched the low sun turning the sweep of prairie and wetlands around me a luminous gold. I could hear the whistles and high-pitched quacks of ducks coming from the shallow wetlands to the east, where on our approach to the wet prairie we'd seen an abundance of wildfowl - ducks and dowitchers, white-fronted geese, sandhill cranes, sora rails and swarms of small sandpipers whose muted winter plumage always confounds my attempts at species identification.

I imagined it must have been like this along the entire broad sweep of Texas' coastal prairie and marshes in late winter long ago, when the land was a whole living thing whose face changed slowly and rhythmically through shift of season, ebb and flow of tides and rivers and rainfall, lightning-ignited wildfires and the cleaving hooves of great herds of bison.

And I tried to conjure the unimaginable clouds of migratory wildfowl that each autumn and winter fell from the sky and covered a landscape that shimmered with millions of wetlands, large and small, fresh and brackish and salt.

Some of this is an artifact of being a Southerner, an 11th-generation member of a culture in which, for good or ill, the past is, as Faulkner said, "… never dead. It's not even past." Except it is. Most of it, anyway.

But snipe and snipe hunting are rare remaining direct connections to that past. And that makes them particularly valuable.

Wonderfully delicious

Snipe - Wilson's snipe, officially, and "jacksnipe" to many - were one of the most sought-after of a dozen or so shorebirds the first three or four generations of Texas' immigrants from the United States hunted, both for recreation and commercially.

Snipe, which gravitate to wet or thinly flooded grasslands, where they employ their long bills sporting flexible tips to probe the mud and soft soil for worms, insects and other invertebrates, are wonderfully delicious on the table - rich and dark and infused with the organic flavor of the earth.

Snipes' abundance and culinary qualities, and that of yellowlegs, plovers, curlews and the other shorebirds, made them the target of the commercial market hunting businesses that sprung up along the Texas coast beginning as early as the 1830s and lasting until the turn of the 20th century.

End of market hunting

Forest McNeir was one of those who gunned snipe for the commercial market. Born in 1875, he grew up in Smith Point at the juncture of Galveston Bay and East Galveston Bay, square in the middle of some of the wintering grounds of all manner of migratory wildfowl. As a young man, he gunned ducks and geese and shorebirds for the Galveston and Houston markets.

He hunted snipe mostly on the wet prairies and marshy grasslands of the Trinity River delta. McNeir was good at his trade and became a spectacularly effective shotgunner. He also was a keen observer of the natural world and a fine and entertaining writer. His autobiography is a fascinating insight into a Texas straddling the frontier and modern ages, a time when the wholeness of the state's coastal prairies and wetlands had been eroded only at the edges and the great flocks of migratory wildfowl still fell on the region in numbers uncountable.

The abundance he saw, and the toll he and others took, are stunning. Several times each autumn and winter, McNeir would gun snipe on the Trinity Delta marsh and prairie, living aboard his sailboat and bringing enough shot and powder to load 1,800 shells. That would last him about a week, by which time he'd typically have 1,400 snipe in the vessel's hold. He sold the snipe for a dollar a dozen.

That world ended in the early 1900s when a combination of habitat destruction and changing social and environmental mores, triggered in large part by the undeniable and dramatic decline in wildfowl numbers, saw, finally, the end of market hunting.

Beginning in 1918, hunting of most shorebirds was banned. Snipe were protected until 1953, when they were designated as a game bird - snipe are one of only two shorebirds considered game birds; woodcock, a forest-dwelling shorebird, is the other.

The natural wetlands, once vital parts of the fabric of the band of coastal prairie and marsh that arcs the length of the Texas coast, are mostly gone now, torn apart by plow, laser level, dredge, concrete, conceit and the other human-driven forces that shattered and transformed Texas over the past two centuries. The marsh and prairie where McNeir hunted snipe is drowned under a reservoir used for cooling a power plant.

Today, almost all of the remaining scattered wetlands on Texas' coastal prairie are man-made, fashioned and maintained by private landowners, conservation groups, state and federal agencies and, mostly, by groups of wildfowl hunters. Hunting clubs and waterfowl hunting outfitters spend millions of dollars each year building and maintaining and flooding shallow wetlands on the coastal prairie. And it was on such a wetland that I hunted snipe this past weekend.

I occasionally could hear the report of Todd Steele's over/under from another part of the 100-acre of so patch of pasture. Steele, a principal in the Thunderbird Hunting Club, had fashioned this prairie/wetland complex, a mix of shallow impoundments producing crops of aquatic vegetation, rice fields, and the lightly flooded pastureland that isn't really prairie but has to pass for it, these days.

Visceral connection

It is on such mostly man-made wetlands, scattered like postage stamp-size oases on an otherwise sterile landscape, that snipe still settle each autumn and winter and where they fuel themselves for the spring migration back to nesting grounds as far north as the edge of the Arctic. And they come in good numbers; the snipe population is stable, and federal law allows an eight-snipe daily bag limit over a 107-day hunting season; the 2014-15 season ends at sunset today.

But only a relative handful of wingshooters - a couple of thousand, at most, in Texas - take advantage of the opportunity to hunt snipe. It's not an easy thing, mucking across muddy fields in winter. It can be tough to find concentrations of snipe even in the best habitat; snipe are notoriously ephemeral. And snipe are truly challenging and frustrating game, especially when they flush at the edge of range.

But a day spent walking wet prairie, seeing and hearing the flush and flight of snipe, holding and admiring one of these birds in your hand and, later, tasting their singular rich wildness … well, it's like seeing, touching, tasting and connecting with the past. To some of us, this means everything.