Small Bird,
Big Picture

Hunting Snipe and Finding Habitat

The plan was simple. We would haul my canoe and kayak up the levee, drop down into the marsh below, and creep along the mud flats to hunt snipe. It was early September in Missouri, the kickoff of fall hunting season.

 

While most of my hunting buddies were sitting on buckets, waiting for doves to fly over sunflower fields, I'd convinced my friend AJ to trudge through the muck of an old Missouri River oxbow in search of shorebirds.

I poled my canoe through a two-foot-wide channel of water with two inches of water, hoping there would be just enough sheet water to float in the wetland, but quickly gave up. While the marsh did have water, it just wasn't floatable.

Had I not been stuck on the idea of using my canoe to slip silently through the marsh and get close to birds, I would've drove the extra 10 minutes to my best spot. But I didn't. To play into the cliche and spare your time, I'll just say it turned out as you might expect. No snipe.

 

Chris Ingram got into snipe hunting like I did, on accident. He lives in Vermont, chases upland birds and waterfowl and is the editor at American Field Sportsman's Journal. While flyfishing on Lake Champlain, he flushed a group of snipe and this interaction sparked his fascination with hunting this overlooked shorebird.

A snipe hunt, according to Ingram, is just as much about water level as it is about location. Snipe, like other shorebirds, use their bills to hunt for invertebrates, crustaceans, insects, and worms. Ingram has seen the most birds in medium cover, where snipe have enough open patches to run through, but where they also can evade predators if they need to. Proximity to water means proximity to food. Getting that combination of food, water, and cover, like many hunting disciplines, has been key for Ingram's snipe hunting ambitions.

 

Differentiating snipe from other shorebirds has a learning curve. They might be confused with greater yellow legs, killdeer, or sand pipers.

Killdeer are easy enough to distinguish, with their shrill repetitive calls, short beaks, and black neck banding.

Greater yellow legs, especially juveniles, tend to look the most like snipe. They tend to be slenderer than snipe, with more white and a shorter bill. Adult greater yellowlegs have very long, very colorful legs, hence the name. Adult snipe's legs are a more brownish color, and they look quite plump in comparison.

Like woodcock, a snipe's bills is nearly two thirds the length of their body and the bill alone can be a great clue as to which species you are seeing. Thankfully, snipe will often let you see them on open flats so long as you are partially concealed. It's not a bad idea to bring a small pair of binoculars to scope out a shoreline before walking it.

 

Ingram emphasized that if he's unsure when a bird flushes, he lets it go, but that over time, he's come to recognize their scratchy fleeing call and the zig zag flight pattern that makes them such a challenge to shoot on the wing. He typically packs a 28-gauge over-and-under with #8 bismuth shells for extra knockdown power, though he says steel shot works just fine as well.

The strategy for hunting snipe is simple. Find mud flats with brush cover nearby and start walking. This can be done with or without a dog, but it's a good idea to try and force snipe to flush towards open flats or the water to make retrieval easier.

In my experience, snipe don't tend to be particularly spooky, so you can often sneak up on them if you hide your approach. While perhaps a bit taboo, I will shoot snipe on the ground in the interest of ensuring I recover my birds, but if that offends your sensibility, snipe are a wingshooting target that will test your skills.

An alternate strategy, so long as local regulations allow it, is to use a canoe or kayak to sneak along marsh edges. However a person chooses to pursue snipe, it's the simplicity of the hunt that is a big part of the appeal. If you have a pair of muck boots and a shotgun, you can hunt them.

Snipe rely on ephemeral cycles of water to create the habitat they need. Few types of wetlands fit this description as well as the Prairie Pothole region, famed for its pivotal role in waterfowl production. Snipe frequent these seasonal wetlands to breed and rely on the influx and outflow of water to create their food base, primarily invertebrates and insects that live in the moist soil and shallow water.

Yet, many of these wetlands are being drained for agricultural use and development. Tyler Zimmerman, a Pheasants and Quail Forever Wetland Restoration Specialist, attributes much of this habitat loss to the construction of drainage ditches. A recent project in Otter Tail County Minnesota converted crop land back into a sheet water wetland using a method called wetland scraping.

 

Wetland scraping involves taking the sediment that washes into a wetland and using it to fill in the drainage ditches which were put in for agriculture. This type of habitat is especially vulnerable to water and wind erosion from surrounding ag land, as often the elevation changes that create the wetlands are only a few inches difference from the surrounding land. Scraping that top layer of sediment away creates a place for water to pool again and it restores the normal soil structure that would have been there.

"The wetland soil underneath that is full of organic material that's needed for a healthy wetland and underneath that is the original clay layer that helps hold water," says Zimmerman. "That wetland area should also still have seeds from aquatic plants in the seed bank that can come back up if given the right conditions."

In Missouri, a similar effort at wetland restoration is being undertaken by Quail Forever along the Mississippi River corridor. This area, much like the Prairie Pothole region, has flat, flood prone land and pressure from agricultural development has caused much of the wetland habitat to disappear. The transitions between upland habitat, where bobwhites thrive bleeds in and out of the shallow depressions and seasonal pools.

Also unique to this area are sand lenses or sand boils, which are high spots of sandy soil caused by the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812. Amongst other things, this series of powerful seismic disturbances sent bluffs cascading into the Mississippi as well as formed the famous waterfowl destination Reelfoot Lake. Upland grasses and forbs thrive in the sandy soil left over by the earthquake and when the seasonal pools dry up in the summer, it provides quail with ripe feeding zones.

 

Quail Forever's work also extends into the southeast. Louisiana is an important wintering ground for snipe and other shorebirds and private lands conservation in the Bayou State has big positive impacts for snipe populations nationwide.

"Like any other species of migratory bird, snipe rely on suitable habitat for food, cover, and resting opportunities during migration," says Jackson Martini, Quail Forever Louisiana State Coordinator.

"Though there are various wildlife refuges, preserves, and other public access areas across the country, there are even more privately owned acres. This makes properly managed private lands critically important to migratory species. Quail Forever biologists provide technical assistance to landowners to ensure migratory birds reach their destinations in good health," Martini adds.

Quail Forever's landscape-level approach is helping by enhancing agricultural lands to provide significant habitat benefits to shorebirds. Our work with partnering agencies to deliver Farm Bill programs such as EQIP's Working Lands for Wildlife is directly benefiting shorebirds in Louisiana by helping farmers temporarily create shallow wetland habitats on their agricultural lands.

Whether it's Minnesota, Missouri, or Louisiana, Quail Forever habitat work creates havens for snipe as they migrate southward and open hunting opportunities for anyone savvy enough to chase them.

 

This story originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Quail Forever Journal.

Gilbert Randolph is a regional WLFW communications specialist at Quail Forever.
He can be reached at grandolph@quailforever.org.