For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land.
—Solomon 2:12
King Solomon, legend has it, possessed a magical ring that allowed him to communicate with animals. But it doesn’t take the ring of Solomon to understand birdsong in springtime. It’s downright hard, even, to misunderstand the ballads of birds in the grip of spring lust, as each male competes to claim territory and a mate, fiercely announcing his intentions to the world.
One of the very first songs of spring pierces the veil of dusk and dawn in a most unassuming way, as if its maker, the male woodcock, doesn’t want to build up anyone’s expectations. His nasal peents, repeated in a valiant, endless succession (up to 200 in the span of five minutes), don’t seem like they’d attract the attention of any hen worth her feathers - that is, if they weren’t punctuated by a spectacular aerial display every few minutes.
A good round of peents, much like a wound-up spring under tension, seems to catapult the woodcock into the stratosphere. It takes mere seconds for a modest ground peenter to become a whistling aerial acrobat. The bachelor bird’s wings beat in a musical twitter as he spirals ever higher, often backlit by the first or last rays of the sun; up there, he tops off his performance with a liquid song. Once you think you have a bead on him, he’ll suddenly drop out of sight, alight on his starting perch, and repeat the whole procedure all over again, and again, and again, often for an hour or more.
In late March, when the ground is clearing of snow and he can stab the thawed earth with his exaggerated, shorebird-like bill, the woodcock’s love dance is underway, albeit during the murk of early morning and late evening, lending the whole display the anonymity of a shadow-puppet play. With oversized eyes that can see in a 360-degree arc, the woodcock female has an easier time making out the location of her intended. If his antics have caught her attention, she’ll go to him, receive his attentions, and perhaps even send a few victory peents of her own out into the gloaming.
But the woodcock’s just a shy performer in the dressing room compared with the full-blown circus of songbirds that arrives in town in late March and early April, their veins thrumming with hormones as if timed to mimic the rising sap in the trunks of their forest perches. Red-winged blackbirds and bluebirds are the early acts, soon followed by other colorful characters who dominate center stage while their objects of affection watch and evaluate from an early spring grandstand.
The male bluebird arrives a few days before the female and flies about, sorting out his territory and poking his head into tree hollows and manmade nest boxes; once he has a good inventory of potential nesting sites, he’ll start singing his musical chur-wi until he has caught the attention of the better camouflaged female. He’ll then escort her about the premises, all the while showing her what a vigorous fellow he is by singing and waving his wings about, proffering choice morsels of food, and perching at the threshold of especially appealing cavities with a provocative bit of nesting material in his beak.
The red-winged blackbird leaves nest site selection entirely to the female - but leaves nothing to spare in his quest to attract her attention. As newly arrived flocks of bachelor redwings break apart and individuals claim their wet, grassy territories, highly camouflaged females scope out the selection from the underbrush. Males belt out enthusiastic conq-uer-ees from elevated perches, all the while flashing their red shoulder patches - or epaulets - to paramour and rival alike. During the brief “dating” period, male and female may fly together, him singing and flashing his epaulets and even sometimes grabbing her, which sends the pair crashing to the ground.
Bird courtship is, in fact, more often than not a violent affair. What is to us an exuberant song or a playful chase may in truth be a serious display to ward off rivals; life-or-death in the sense that if a fellow doesn’t stake his claim to a territory, its resources, and its females, his genes will have reached a dead end. The life of a bird is, in all ways - even romance - a serious affair, despite the comical ways in which ardor is often expressed. But it’s hard not to revel in this early season display of love, on the wings of its scheduled but still surprising return after a long absence. The birds usher in a caravan of joy for the eyes, ears, and soul, just in the nick of time.