This recipe almost makes me want to grab a .410 and some waders and hunt those little corkscrew devils.

http://honest-food.net/2015/11...snipe-recipe-salmis/

For those who prefer beer , a full bodied IPA would work well.A nice local beer here is Yuengling Lager.
Shallots are better for these small birds , snipe or grouse .


The snipe question is --- Just as you spot him,only 6' in front of you, he flies toward you skimming the ground .A sudden 90* upward ,then a sharp 90* to fly, head level, behind you !
How did you say you would take that shot ??

The simplest way is to kick them up, let them squawk, corkscrew, and fly away. In about a minute or so they will come back directly above you, loafing somewhat, wondering what stirred them up. They are much easier to hit at that point.

I killed hundreds, if not thousands of snipe, when I had ready access to a giant rice farm in NW Louisiana because of my helping them with their blackbird problems. They are really fun to shoot. I never found them all that difficult, preferred using 9s or 10s for the first shot. In my younger days, I had very quick reflexes and could usually get on them and down them before they achieved enough distance for the wavering flight path to make it more difficult. Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of misses in there. Like Doubless says, they will circle around and that, to me, was a tougher shot, than the flush. To each his own.

OTOH, I didn't particularly like eating snipe, they tasted like a combination of dirt and earthworms to me. I ate a bunch, wrapped in bacon and soaked in Italian dressing, with or without a jalapeno, but never really liked them. Luckily I had a partner who would eat anything so I gave most of them to him and his friends.

The only birds I've shot that many consider edible that I don't prefer to eat are snipe, pheasants, sage grouse, and sharp tailed grouse.

Yup, Scot, that's how I bagged most of mine unless they were really thick.

Bill, my son refers to them as "supercharged kiwi fruit with wings". (I think he is referring to their size, not the way they taste.)

Sadly, all the rice prairie I grew up hunting has now been turned into either grazing land or soybeans, and I don't have access to rice fields any more. I can't tell you the numbers of pintails, teal, snow geese and Hutchinson Canadians we shot over the years. Or the snipe, either.

I used to shoot quite a few along some marsh and sloughs where i grew up in CO. Fun to hunt but doves are better eating.

I've shot a ton and I've eaten a ton and the shooting is more enjoyable by a long-shot.
I'm sure I've shot some pass-shooting but the sport to me was on the jump. When my little 16 ga SxS barked there was "usually" a snipe to retrieve.
Zeke

I used to go snipe hunting out on the mesa near Las Cruces, New Mexico when I was in college. There were no snipe out on the mesa near Las Cruces, New Mexico, but if my date had a good sense of humor, and an "evil" mind, it worked out for both of us.

I never called it a snipe, but I certainly have hunted it practically everywhere.