At the time I could not at all guess what it was--an extraordinary sound unlike anything I had heard before. I could not tell from what direction it came, and it filled me with a curious suspense. My Finnish interpreter thought it was a Capercally (_Tetrao urogallus_) and at the time I could not contradict him; but soon I found that it was a small bird gliding at a wild pace at a great height over the marsh. I know not how better to describe the noise than by likening it to the cantering of a horse in the distance over a hard hollow road; it came in fours with a similar cadence and a like clear, yet hollow, sound. The same day we found a nest which seemed of a kind unknown to me. The next morning I went to Kharto-uoma with a good strength of beaters. I kept them as well as I could in line, myself in the middle, my Swedish traveling companion on one side, and the Finn talker on the other. Whenever a bird was put off its nest the man who saw it was to pass on the word and the whole line was to stand whilst I went to examine the eggs and take them at once or observe the bearings of the spot for another visit as might be necessary. We had not been many hours in the marsh when I saw a bird get up before Herr Saloman, and I marked it down. In the meantime the nest was found and when I came up the owner was declared to have appeared striped on the back and not white over the tail. A sight of the eggs, as they lay untouched, raised my expectations to the highest pitch. I went to the spot where I had marked the bird, put it up again, found that it was indeed a jack snipe, and again saw it after a short, low flight drop suddenly into cover; once more it rose a few feet from where it had settled, I fired and in a minute had in my hand a true jack snipe, the undoubted parent of the nest of eggs. In the course of the day and night I found three more nests and examined the birds of each. One allowed me to touch it with my hand before it rose, and another only got up when my foot was within 6 inches of it. It was very fortunate that I was thus able satisfactorily to identify so fine a series of eggs, for they differ considerably from one another.
The great German ornithologist Naumann (1887) also describes the nuptial flight, as observed by him in still weather on spring evenings; as scarcely audible at over a hundred paces and recalling the tapping noise made by the death-watch beetle. He writes the sound as "_Tettettettettett_," etc., and says each note lasts six seconds at a time, as the bird sweeps over the marsh now rising and then falling in tone as it is uttered.