Iowa · MigratoryWilson's / common snipe

Iowa DNR publishes no snipe-specific hunting-zone map (statewide season), and unlike the sibling rail record, Wilson's snipe is documented in Iowa primarily as a migrant rather than a confirmed local breeder -- its breeding range sits mostly north of Iowa in Canada and the northern-tier states. The real regional signal is therefore about migration stopover habitat rather than nesting range, and it points to the same Des Moines Lobe / north-central Iowa prairie-pothole belt named in the sibling rail record: a companion Iowa State University research program to the marsh-bird breeding study (Vanausdall & Dinsmore, Waterbirds 2019, and a related Wildlife Society Bulletin follow-up) surveyed migratory shorebird use -- a group that includes Wilson's snipe -- at 30 of Iowa's restored/soon-to-be-restored shallow lakes across spring 2016-2018, finding restored sites in this same north-central/northwest Iowa footprint held substantially more waterbirds and species than non-restored sites, with mudflats at drained basins specifically noted as shorebird habitat. No comparable concentration of shallow-lake/mudflat habitat exists elsewhere in Iowa.