Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [21]
The flock, when it first comes to our marsh, ceaselessly chatters high in the top of a maple or some other tree that is still bare. Eventually one or two of the more eager or venturesome birds will fly down to the willows. Another one or two will follow. Then, for the first time, you hear their unmistakable vocal signature, the “oog-le-eee” that they give only at “home.” Then also, for the first time they display their garish crimson shoulder patches, which they have so far kept hidden. The males must be displaying for each other; the females won’t be back for weeks.
Within half an hour the whole flock may reassemble in a tree, and then fly off again. But from now on they will reappear almost every day, and each time these males will spread out in the bog and take up their stations at specific cattail stalks or viburnum bushes. Each day they come a little earlier from feeding areas in surrounding fields and woods where the snow has melted. By early April, when the pond ice melts, they begin to stay almost full-time, and by then (if not since years before), they probably know each other. Latecomers, who are probably strangers to the bog, are chased vigorously, not only by any one territory-holder, but also with the active participation of his neighbors.
Then one day the sun shines brightly. The ice melts. The first painted turtles come out of the mud and sun themselves on half-submerged logs, a bittern calls from his hiding place among a tangle of last years’ cattail fronds, and a snipe who seems only a speck high in the sky sounds forth in an unearthly whinnying. Now the redwing females, brown sparrow-colored birds, arrive and skulk close to the ground amid the tangled sedges and cattails. Then, after the sedge leaves start poking straight up through last year’s matted brown leaves, you may—if you are patient—see one of the unobtrusive females carrying in her beak a long-dead brown sedge frond. A nest is being built; ovaries are enlarging and eggs are ripening. One after another of four eggs, with a sky blue shell marked with purple and black squiggles and spots, will be sheathed within the oviduct. The female will sit in the nest for four mornings in a row, to lay for four days, one egg at a time. During those days, or just before, you see her making a “baby bird” display by vibrating her wings, and then you see a copulation.
The Woodcock. The woodcocks arrive on the first patch of earth that’s clear of snow, in late March or early April. This is also when the geese first return for a visit to see if the pond is free of ice. It usually isn’t, and they walk around on the ice and then leave, to try again a few days later.
The woodcocks (also called timberdoodles or wood snipes) put on spectacular flight displays that commence almost immediately after they return. A woodcock obtains its diet of angleworms by probing in the mud with its specially designed tool, a long bill with an overhang of the upper mandible at the tip. Do woodcocks probe at random? How or even if they feed when they first come back (when the ground often freezes solid nightly) is a mystery. Aside from food, what a male certainly needs on first returning is a lot of sky for his mating dance, and a little patch of open ground as a landing and launching platform.
Fig. 10. Portrait of a baby woodcock, showing its already well-developed bill, which is specialized to probe deeply in soft mud.
Words cannot do justice to the woodcocks’ sky dance. As a prelude to it, the woodcock, with a puffed-out chest that makes him look like a miniature bantam rooster, struts on his little patch of overgrown field and makes little hiccup sounds interspersed with “peents.” He gives the impression of a drunk