After 23 years of working as a professional naturalist and nature photographer, it is a rare and wonderful thing for me to be able to introduce you to a species that I have never covered before. All of the “low hanging fruit” has been picked and the species found on my “most wanted” list are the tricky ones. The northern goshawk, the white-eyed vireo and the boreal chickadee are all species that are going to require a massive stroke of luck for me to capture photos of them. Then there are the relatively common species that have proven diabolically elusive for one reason or another. Well, I can finally cross one of those species off my list.
The American woodcock (Scolopax minor) is a species that I have been familiar with since the first days of my wildlife biology training at UMass Amherst in 1986. A member of the shorebird family, this chunky little bird is actually one of the largest birds in the sandpiper family. It is also one of those species, like the Wilson’s snipe, that has stepped away from the ocean shorelines to exploit habitats that are found across the inland areas of the eastern half of North America.
About 11 inches in length (much of it is accounted for by that long bill), this secretive bird is a denizen of soggy places where the soil is wet and the earthworms are plentiful. Because much of my backyard consists of wet meadow, I have an ideal habitat for woodcocks and they are present almost every spring. The one exception was last year. I didn’t hear a single woodcock last spring, but that may have been due to the multiple snow events that we had in April and May.
The most remarkable behavior of this bird has to be the courtship displays of male woodcocks. It starts off with a wonderful buzzy call that sounds like the bird is saying “peent … peent … peent.” As with many bird vocalizations, it is difficult to do justice to this call, but once you hear it you will never forget it. The male makes this call to advertise his location and once he thinks he has an audience he will move on to the more dramatic second act of his performance.
The male will launch himself up into the air and begin to fly in large circles while climbing in altitude. The higher he gets the tighter the circles become so that if you were to trace his flight pattern it would describe the shape of a cone. When he finally reaches the apex of his cone-shaped flight he will then burst out with a chaotic array of beeping, burbling notes while falling back to the ground like a fluttering leaf. I can’t think of any other way of describing it other than a series of notes that sound like “beep … bop … boop,” with the notes descending in pitch just as he is descending in altitude. He goes silent as he lands back at his display spot and then a second or two later you hear, “peent!”
All of this effort is undertaken to attract females who will tour the landscape and sample the performances by different males. When a particular male captures the fancy of a particular female, she will mate with him and she will “set up shop” somewhere close to his display area. And, as often is the case with birds, that is all of the involvement of the male in reproduction. The female will undertake the rest of the job by herself.
This involves finding a place to “build” a nest, but American woodcocks don’t really put a lot of effort into that particular job. Like many of their shorebird relatives, the nest is little more than a depression in the ground in an area covered with dead leaves. Occasionally there may be an outlining of small sticks and possibly even a lining of the nest with pine needles, but that is about it. The female will lay 3 to 5 eggs that are light brown in color with darker blotches on them. She will then incubate the eggs for about three weeks.
Woodcock chicks are precocial, which means, like baby chickens, they can toddle around on the ground soon after they hatch. The female will lead them to places where she can find suitable food for them, which means that she looks for places with damp soils where she can use her long bill to probe the ground for worms. At first the mother woodcock will feed her chicks, but as they grow they will experiment with looking for their own food. Eventually, they will become old and strong enough to become independent and are gradually weaned off of the reliance on their mother.
Then they spend the rest of the summer feeding and growing stronger. Their method of plunging those long beaks into the ground to probe for food has actually had an impact on the shape of their heads. The eyes of American woodcocks are set back on the skull, which allows them to keep a lookout for danger while their faces are jammed into the ground. Like rabbits, but perhaps even more so, they can see behind them almost better than they can see straight in front of them.
Clearly, birds that rely on damp ground full of earthworms cannot linger long in the north when temperatures start to fall with the approach of winter. After fattening up on good food they will migrate south to a winter range that forms a crescent shape that includes New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida and the Gulf states as far west as east Texas. There the birds continue in their pursuit of delectable earthworms until the warming temperatures of spring make food available in the north once more.
Keep your eyes peeled for American woodcocks, but know that their coloration provides such outstanding camouflage that you may never see one. You might have more luck if you visit an open field in a quiet setting just after sunset. Listen for the “peent!” calls of the males and then scan the sky for his silhouette as he performs his nuptial flight. Anyone who witnesses such a display will instantly fall in love with the woodcock.
Bill Danielson has been a professional writer and nature photographer for 23 years and this is the first time he has been able to write about the natural history of the American Woodcock. He has worked for the National Park Service, the US Forest Service and the Massachusetts State Parks and currently teaches high school biology and physics.
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