“Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk…”
The American Woodcock is known by many colorful names, including timberdoodle, bogsucker, Labrador twister, big-eye, night partridge, and mudsnipe. What could this diminutive bird have done to earn such memorable appellations?
For starters, although superbly adapted, they are rather silly looking. Woodcocks have a plump, round body, short legs, a rounded head, and a very long, prehensile bill. Their large eyes, good for letting in light during dawn and dusk when they are active, are located high on their heads. Their visual field is probably the largest of any bird: 360° in the horizontal plane and 180° in the vertical plane. They are only about 10 inches from tip of bill to end of tail, and their bill is nearly three inches of that distance. Their feathers are many shades of browns and grey, with a bit of black. This spectacular camouflage makes them difficult to see against the fallen leaves where they often forage.
Just as eye-catching as their appearance is their unique, bobbing gait. Woodcocks look as though they are bouncing in time to their own internal music as they walk along, stopping every now and then to probe the soil with their long beaks to look for earthworms – one of their favorite foods.
Woodcocks are a shorebird in the same family as sandpipers, but they make their homes in the forests and perform their breeding displays in open, wet fields. They use a variety of habitats, even in the course of a day. They prefer open, damp fields for their dawn and dusk courtship displays, but they tend to feed and rest in bushy, shrubby areas, including alder stands and old apple orchards. For nesting and raising their young, they seek out young or mixed-aged forests with hardwood trees less than 20 years old. At night they will roost, not in trees, but sitting on the ground among scattered shrubs. Scientists refer to this kind of mixed habitat use as a “habitat mosaic.”
If you are outside near a field at dusk between late February and early April, you may be fortunate enough to hear the male woodcock “peenting.” This nasal call is followed by the sound of air whistling through his stiff primary wing-feathers as he ascends in a spiral flight-pattern hundreds of feet into the air, only to plummet back to the exact same location from which he rose – accompanied by noisy warbling and twittering. Then the male will strut about, peenting some more, and generally showing off for any hens in the vicinity.
Right now in Maine, woodcocks are arriving back from the Gulf states where they spent the winter, and this is a great time to witness their “sky dance.” Visit any open, damp field in March or April and listen for the “peenting” call at dusk.
