Twenty Years' Snipe-Shooting: Extracts from the Daily Journal of the Game-Books of the Snipery

Facsimile reprint of the 1899 edition, 2nd Ltdedn of 300 copies of which this is #17 . Octavo. full dark blue gilt decorated faux leather, gilt titles, in gilt decorated faux leather slip case, Interior pages are clean in every way throughout. Ow VG/vgSlipcase/ndj: [vi],x,324pp, 8 bw plates horstexte. With added Introduction by Worth Mathewson. A blow by blow account of twenty years' snipe shooting in nineteenth-century America [1867-1900]: where, how and how many were shot, culminating in a total for the period of 78,602 and 3,499 various. He laments the decline of the snipe in America and blames it on habitat loss. This is a facsimile edition of the scarce Knickerbocker Press edition of 1899 of which only 200 copies were printed. Record of the sporting life in southern Louisiana, his shooting near the Teche and Attakapas country, which was Acadian settlement area very near the coast. "I shot almost altogether on the Camperdown and Cypre-Mort grounds; both very extensive inland marshes, with low prairies and sloughs adjacent." Pringle was the son of the distinguished South Carolina politician, John Julius Pringle, and here he recounts in elaborate detail (and with marvelous photographs) his hunting experiences over twenty years from 1867 in the bayous of Louisiana. It is also an account of the ecological consequences of the conversion of marshlands to agricultural purposes: with draining of the swamps and the extension of the New Orleans and Opelousas Railway (now the Southern Pacific) to Franklin, the snipe came no more. Pringle also calls attention to the destruction of northern nesting grounds and the effect upon snipe populations.…