Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Snipe Hunt
The first time I heard of snipes, I was on a hayride, and this guy we were with says, 
“Let’s go on a snipe hunt!” I said, “A snipe hunt? What’s a snipe hunt?” He says, “Don’t 
worry—let’s just go.” So we went into the woods and he said, “Start looking for snipes.” 
So we all started looking for snipes, not knowing what we were looking for, just beating 

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Examples and Texts 81
the bushes, and just looking. Then finally, I just got real tired and frustrated, because I 
couldn’t find a snipe, because I didn’t know what a snipe was—I was getting frustrated 
looking for something I didn’t know. After I realized we’d been fooled, I started laughing 
at the people still looking. So that was my first encounter with snipes.
David Chinery collected this narrative from a female senior at Cook College in 
New Brunswick, New Jersey, and published the text in his “Snooping for Snipes” 
(1987). This classic prank has been traced back to lumberjacks’ and hunters’ 
initiatory behavior in northern Wisconsin during the first half of the twentieth 
century (Starr 184). Snipes, elusive shorebirds, do exist, but not in wooded areas. 
For another good example of a snipe hunt, see Bronner (170–71).
Switching Places
Kim and I would switch places in school. We did this a lot in the fourth grade. When we 
came into class I would go to her seat and she would go to mine. The teacher would never 
notice, ever. The only problem we had was when we had writing assignments. I write with 
my right hand and she writes with her left hand. So both of us would have to switch our 
writing hands, and that never worked.
Diane Lutes told student fieldworker Judith Rush about switching places with 
her twin sister Diane in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, in 1986. Her story is one 
of many amusing anecdotes in Rush’s “Twin Pranks and Practical Jokes” (1987). 
Rush concludes that twin pranks let twins “perform for their peers” and “retaliate 
at a society who sees them as a unit” (6). It is not surprising to hear that identical 
twins have the best success in playing such pranks, while fraternal twins have a 
lower success rate.