Because of standardized tests, I thought snipe were fictional birds. When I was in school, every spring we took assessments called Iowa tests. One year, I read a passage about a group of kids who tricked a newcomer into holding open a sack at night to catch a snipe as it ran into the bag. Of course, no snipe ever materialized. After the passage, a multiple-choice question asked whether a snipe was a real bird, an imaginary bird or something else. Based on the passage, I answered that it was an imaginary bird. And for many years, I did not think snipe were real.
But, in fact, snipe are real and in the sandpiper family. Snipe even live in Massachusetts, and some people hunt them. (This year, the hunting season opened Sept. 2.) Whatever you have heard, you cannot catch them by holding open a gunnysack in the woods.
The Wilson’s snipe (Gallinago delicata) is similar to its cousin the woodcock, but smaller. Snipe have long bills, which they use to probe for worms, larvae and bugs in the mud. They can open the flexible tip of their bill to slurp up food while it is still inserted in the muck – because snipe live near marshes or wetlands.
These robin-sized birds arrive in our area every spring and leave mostly in mid-October. They overwinter along the Atlantic coast as far south as Colombia and Venezuela.
Snipe were heavily hunted in Cambridge and Somerville in the 1800s, but they are difficult to shoot because they are fast and erratic flyers. It takes a skilled shooter to bag one (hence the word sniper, which refers to a highly skilled sharpshooter).
According to ornithologist William Brewster (whose house still stands on Brattle Street) in 1906:
Wilson’s snipe used to occur in sufficient numbers to afford really good shooting, sixty-five or seventy years ago, in the then vacant and ill-drained but now thickly settled regions, lying between Broadway and Cambridge Street near Harvard College, and, also, to the south of Dana Hill in Cambridgeport … I remember starting a stray one in 1867 or 1868 in a field at the corner of Fayette Street and Broadway, within fifty yards of the Cambridge High School. Up to 1870 or a little later Wilson’s Snipe were regularly found about wet hollows bordering Vassall Lane, and so numerously at times that I have flushed upwards of fifty there in a single afternoon.
According to the Cambridge Chronicle of Aug. 13, 1910, Timothy Tufts of Somerville was the supreme snipe shooter of his day:
There were few men in America of whatever age who could equal Mr. Tufts when it came to getting a bird on the wing. The Tufts farm at one time extended all the way from Willow avenue to Cedar street and was a mile long and a quarter of a mile broad. Over all this Mr. Tufts shot snipe and plover. One fall Mr. Tufts kept strict account of the birds he shot, and the record for that one autumn on snipe alone was fifty-seven birds.
He undoubtedly had an instinct for shooting, for the very first day he went out he had made an enviable record. That was when he was only 10 years old, away back in 1828. He had persuaded his father to let him have a small double-barreled gun, and with this he started out one afternoon accompanied by another boy of his own age, George Tapley.
The two lads strode through the fields. Suddenly two snipe flew from the ground. Quick as lightning young Tufts brought his gun to his shoulder and fired. One of the birds fell to the ground, but before it reached there the young sportsmen had discharged the second barrel and the other bird, too, fell dead.
Mr. Tufts liked to tell of young Tapley’s going home and relating to the elder Tapley the adventure of the afternoon.
“My boy, I’m afraid I shall have to give you a sound whipping,” said old Mr. Tapley. “You are lying to me; Tim Tufts never shot two snipe. He’s not old enough to do such a thing.”
The two Tapleys had a long argument, but the boy was firm, and from that day on Timothy Tufts was recognized by every man, woman and child who knew him as the best shot around Somerville.
Of course, not everyone felt so charitable about snipe shooting. After one 1913 Cambridge Chronicle article praising Richard J. Gardner, a Morse grammar school student and the youngest snipe shooter in Cambridge, an angry Upland Road reader, wrote:
The food value of the snipe is pathetic … The meal of an entire bird is lifted to the mouth on the point of a single-tined fork … It takes about twenty snipe to make a small snipe pie, but the proportion of snipe “sportsmen” required to make one real sportsman is far greater.
There are, without doubt, several snipe “sportsmen” in Cambridge, but I’ll wager there isn’t one of them with sufficient courage or “red blood” to declare publicly that he considers his silly pastime a real sport … A snipe “sportsman” is the sort of man who would tease a sick child.
Could Cambridge and Somerville also have been the origin of another use of the word “snipe” – attacking someone verbally in a petty way?
Reader photo
Helmie van Oers spotted this red admiral butterfly in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, on Sept. 5.
Have you taken photos of our urban wild things? Send your images to Cambridge Day and we may use them as part of a future feature. Include the photographer’s name and the general location where the photo was taken.
Jeanine Farley is an educational writer who has lived in the Boston area for more than 30 years. She enjoys taking photos of our urban wild things.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)3 nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.