When the acrobatic scolopacid emits his characteristic cry, perhaps it is already too late to even target him.
Hunters and auxiliaries have to be smarter than him. To hunt the snipe, the prince of the flyers who populate the marshes, it is necessary to have a pointing dog. Teaching the new hunter how snipes are hunted is something that can be accepted, pretending to teach an adult dog is absurd, so we will tell you what the dog should not do. The auxiliary who, as soon as he sets foot on the ground, rushes into the sedge improvising time trials, must be immediately returned to the kennel. The dog that stretches, but keeps it steady until the owner arrives, can also be tolerated.
Often, however, it is the snipe that does not keep it steady, so the dog must always remain in the vicinity of the owner. The snipe can be found anywhere, even at the hunter's feet, if the dog has not yet moved in that direction. It loves to entertain itself in the “sawn”, among which it searches for larvae and worms that live in the marshy areas. When he is in pasture, he usually moves around tracing paths in the shape of a horseshoe. Due to this strange way of proceeding, the dog is very often bewildered by the confused and close traces so as to anticipate them. In this case the snipe can take flight behind him, catching the same hunter off guard who has in the meantime followed the evolution of the situation.
During the search, the various "toh", "here", "go there" and so on are useless: if we have trained him to perform certain operations, which until yesterday gave satisfactory results, it is not necessary, every time, to take the chair , but we must let him do his job, taking care, we, to do ours when it is time to shoot. When the dog is stationary, it is up to the hunter to choose the ideal position. Let's not forget that the snipe has, momentarily, one more chance against us: the surprise. With the dog pointed it is not allowed to be distracted, but neither to remain rigid and petrified with the hands glued on the gun: who will take flight is a bird, not a lion. Although, in some cases and with the "galleries" that always watch the scene from a distance, it can be said that the pan leaves more its mark on a snipe than the paw of a lion.
The scolopacide tightrope walk puts even the most skilled shooter to the test. In fact, it can rise, silently, proceeding linearly at high speed. Or, more frequently, it gets up emitting the classic "kiss" and, zigzagging a few tens of centimeters from the ground, in a few seconds it takes you to the top of the sky, even before the hunter has had the opportunity to take aim. Only in the first case is it possible to shoot from a thrust, or to let the game relax. But it doesn't always behave like this, so the “thin” figures are on the agenda. Meeting the snipe "croccoloni", now almost disappeared from the hunting scene has always been everyone's dream. They are bigger than the common snipe, and for their uniform and linear flight they remind us of the woodcock. Even the "whisk", smaller relative of the three subjects, has a straight flight, despite the name it bears, and does not present great difficulties in shooting, although, in some cases, it can induce the stacker to make unexpected advances. This little colopacid shows an unprecedented cunning, rarely found in the wild. After an unsuccessful shot, he lets himself fall into the sedge as if he had been wounded, causing the inexperienced hunter to insist on a futile search for the place where he fell. In reality, when these whisks are thrown back to the ground perpendicular to the ground, it is very difficult to raise them. They curl up under the grass and no longer move, thus not releasing the past that allows the dog to perceive its traces.
The classic can be used to hunt snipe overlying, Or the Semiautomatic with barrel 68-70 cm in length. The ammunition most suitable are those loaded with lead n. 10, 9, 8 in succession. The morning is over, you can see from the surrounding huts now empty. The hunter, walking with difficulty in the marshes that suck the soles of his boots at every step, returns to the boat. The dog, tired and exempt from his job as a seeker, is attracted to those two reedbats who quarrel on the crest of a cinnamon. On the boat, everyone takes their place again. The dog, on the tip, is already undergoing personal cleaning. While the hunter is about to take off his boots, the sudden "kiss" of a snipe, which rises from a few steps up into the sky, confirms, once again, that on the marshy scene there is never a script: a subject, indeed, a surprise.