This season on blood trails, each story begins with a hunter stepping into the wild, but not all of them come back.

I'm Jordan Sillers, a journalist with over a decade of experience investigating stories about hunting, fishing, guns, and crime.

Join me as we track the truth through tangled cover and cold case files, where every trail tells a story,

and every story leaves its own trail of blood.

Blood trails. Listen now on Spotify.

Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both.

Big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support of this podcast.

I'm your host, Lake Pickle.

On this episode, we're going to learn about one of the most famed hunting pranks that has been getting pulled on unsuspecting victims from all the way back to the 1800s,

up until this very day. And the actual small hunting culture built around this animal.

You take someone out and you put him in the woods in the dark and you leave them in the woods.

And it's a trick. And when you hear about it, you think, well, man, it sounds like it might be fun.

You never, but he's out there. You just kind of like Bigfoot.

You know, had no idea that that's an actual migratory game bird.

It is legal for harvest.

Have any of you ever heard of a creature called the snipe?

It's time that we do a little snipe hunting.

It's always fascinating and sometimes comical to me when a seemingly obscure and small piece of the natural world stumbles its way into becoming a cultural phenomenon.

And the snipe and the infamous snipe hunting prank has done exactly that.

Today, we're going to learn about the actual bird, because it is indeed a real animal.

Some folks don't know that. We're also going to learn about

how this small critter became the centerpiece for one of the largest and longest running jokes

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