Rhapsody With Snipe

Whether it was high, fiendishly fast or in level flight, when you bring down a snipe it will be the shot everyone remembers, says Blue Zulu

Queen’s theatrical rock has never been my cup of Rosie but there is a line in Bohemian Rhapsody that, slightly distorted, chimes with snipe shooters: “Scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango?”

Of all our quarry species, nothing quite fandangos like a snipe. Its twisting flight, evolved to defeat merlin and peregrine in aerial combat, leaves many shooters gazing at a pile of empties as the flicker of white and brown disappears into grey skies. “Cartridge averages are eight to one, often 10,” warns the handful of shoots specialising in our smallest mainland game bird, an estimate often realised by pheasant shooters when they line up to address these aerobatic imps. They forget that snipe don’t oblige like reared lowland game and ignore the chap standing in his natty tweeds in the middle of pasture. They will take avoiding action whenever danger presents and that means a great deal of zig and zag, leaving most Shots struggling to place the pattern correctly.

Yet driven snipe are, in my experience, a reasonably easy shot if you respect their wild nature.

For many years we took a couple of days in the north, hunting a mix of grouse, wild pheasants, teal and snipe. I earned an entirely undeserved reputation as a decent Shot simply because I could fell snipe fairly frequently. The main “drive” was a 20-acre wilderness of bog, reed and sodden pasture, well poached by Galloway cattle. In camouflage, we would creep round the ground using the stone dykes for cover, staying quiet as death, and hunker down, peeping through the barbed wire snagged with sheep’s wool. The beating line — three keepers and two lads — would plod the marsh, occasionally flapping fertiliser-sack flags.