When mud season arrives, I go out at sunset wearing khakis and a brown-checked jacket. I wait in the brush of a hedgerow that trails down to a wet meadow. The sky turns salmon, then fades to gray as stars begin to flicker.
From the edge of the field comes a ventriloquist-like series of peents that are repeated just seconds apart. Now they sound near, now far, now near again.
After about five minutes of calling, a chunky bird rises into the air. Wings whistle as the bird spirals high into the dusk. Shortly, the flight peaks, and the bird descends on warbling wing beats and lands back in the same spot. The peenting resumes.
The bird in question is the woodcock, the great mud-season aerialist of Vermont and New Hampshire. Woodcocks are famous for crepuscular displays and nocturnal foraging. Their habit of haunting wet places during the mysterious hours of dusk has inspired colorful names: night peck, night partridge, timberdoodle, bogsucker, Labrador twister, and, my favorite, hookum pake.
I once laid down a few feet from where a woodcock was about to land. The bird fluttered down but saw me. Caught between the drive to flee and a desire to continue the courtship, he emitted a cooing woodle each time his head bobbed, sandpiper-like. The timberdoodle tried to resume his mating ritual but couldn’t ignore my intrusion.
Woodcock can grow to 11 inches in length, including their long, curved bills. They have a thick neck and long beak set in a smallish head dominated by enormous eyes. Feathers sport a leaf-like camouflage of mottled browns and flecks of black above, with pale orange-brown below.
These magnificent birds move on stout legs as they search for food in loam, mud, and leaf litter. Like others in the sandpiper family, the woodcock employs strong jaw muscles and a long, sensitive bill to probe the soil. The prehensile tip of the brownish bill can be opened to grasp prey while the rest of the bill remains closed. This is accomplished by muscles at the front of the skull that control a bone that runs the length of the upper bill. When this long bone is pushed forward, the bill’s flexible tip bends up and open while the shorter, lower bill remains fixed.
Earthworms comprise 50 to 90 percent of a woodcock’s food, with most of the rest being larvae, beetles, grasshoppers, flies, crustaceans, spiders, centipedes, and millipedes. Up to a tenth of their diet is vegetable material, such as berries and seeds from blackberries, ragweed, violets, sedges, knotweed, and grasses.
Woodcocks overwinter in southeastern and south-central regions, but they breed throughout much of eastern North America, north to Newfoundland, and west to southern Manitoba. They are found in grassy fields, abandoned farmland, logged and burned areas, low-lying woods, wet meadows, and shrubby forest edges. Search for them in groves of aspen, birch, and red maple less than 25 feet tall, preferably with evergreens in the understory. Woodcocks also frequent alder and willow swales along the margins of streams and ponds.
Look for the woodcock’s aerial mating display on flat to gently sloping sites. I never sneak too close to any particular woodcock more than once in a mating season. After a male is frightened away, he doesn’t resume courtship until the next evening. Repeated disturbance causes males to abandon a site for the season.
Woodcock eyes are set back and high on the head so that they can see while feeding with the bill stuck in the ground. Wide fields of vision overlap at front and rear to create a rare attribute: simultaneous binocular vision both forward and backward.
This also helps the parent keep watch while incubating eggs in the nest – an unlined, leafy depression on the ground. Nests are usually located in shrubby bottomland forest or open, young-to middle-aged deciduous forest near water. Sometimes nests are found at the brushy edge of an open field or on a wetland hummock. The three or four buff to grayish-white eggs are speckled with pale, reddish-brown spots. Woodcock chicks are precocial – they leave the nest, walk, and eat on their own soon after hatching. Tiny, down-covered woodcocklings are all head and eyes.
If the young are threatened, their mother darts erratically, creating a diversion while the chicks escape into the underbrush. Then she disappears, camouflaged with the background. A mother is said to be able to carry a chick to safety by holding it tightly between her feet or thighs and flying away.
It may be the woodcock’s bizarre appearance that many find endearing, or perhaps it’s the suspense of an encounter with a wild creature at dusk, the bewitching hour, at a time of year that can otherwise be bleak and forlorn.