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By Root 802 0

on parade, but then he takes off like a rocket with whirring, whistling wings. Off he flies in a straight line upward, and then after gaining altitude over the treetops surrounding the clearing where he started, he begins to ascend, in ever tighter spirals, into the sky. You hear a high-pitched whistle—made possible by three stiffened feathers on each wing—pulsing to his steady wing beats, sixteen times per second. Then, after reaching an altitude where, although he is the size of a robin, he looks like a tiny dark speck, he interrupts his wing beats with rhythmic pauses and fills in this momentary silence with a high-pitched rhythmic vocal tweeting. The tweeting becomes louder and louder, and the wing beats are more pulsed and rapid, until a crescendo is reached, and at that point he begins his final approach earthward, diving from the height that had made him appear to be but a speck against the darkening sky. His wings still beat rapidly, but his sound-producing feathers are somehow decommissioned so that all you hear now is a dull flutter just before he lands. He settles down at almost at the same spot where he started, to once more resume strutting, hiccupping, and peenting.

The woodcock’s sky dance dazzles because it is both spectacular and subtle. I cannot imagine a summer beginning without it. The sky dance evokes memories of fishing trips to Enchanted Pond with my friend and mentor in Maine, Phil Potter. We camped along the shore opposite a great golden eagle nest on a cliff rising from the opposite shore, shortly after the ice went out. We sat next to a blazing campfire under the stars, and heard the birds’ sweet refrain in the background from somewhere far away. I’ve never tired of experiencing such raw enthusiasm that seems to knows no fatigue, no diminution. I’ve lain under the moon to hear the performance when I went to sleep and again as I woke up. Sometimes I’d find my sleeping bag covered with fresh snow, and I’d wonder if any of the woodcock hens might already be sitting on four yellowish tan eggs that are spotted and mottled with brown and magenta and blend in, like the hen’s back feathers, with last year’s dried leaves.

The Phoebe. A late March snowstorm earlier in the week dumped inches of snow on us, but a south wind is melting it fast. A robin sings, and the redwings are yodeling down in the bog. I expect the phoebe back at any time, too. The phoebe would be flying north now, aided by a wind at night from Alabama or Georgia, and powering itself to hurry along on the homeward journey back to a mere pinpoint on the continent—the house where I live and from where it had left to go south last September. Such feats of endurance and navigation are routine for many migrant birds, but how they might be accomplished still boggles my imagination, no matter how many “explanations”—such as magnetic orientation, use of landmarks, solar orientation, precise timing, and use of prevailing winds—are or could be involved.

I wake up in the gray dawn to the sounds I’ve long awaited: a loud, emphatic, endlessly repeated “dchirzeep, dchirzeep.” The bird’s enthusiasm is infectious. I jump out of bed and announce, “The phoebes are back!”

“The” phoebes leaves a lot unsaid. I have been intimate with phoebes since 1951, when I first met a pair on our farm in Maine, and in our outhouse admired their mud nest, which was garnished with green moss and contained several pearly white eggs. Although I once saw a phoebe nest on a cliff in Vermont, phoebes now nest almost exclusively on and in human dwellings. In the northeast, almost every homestead in or next to woods hosts a resident pair. Phoebes are a fixture of nearly every old farmhouse, barn, or sugar shack.

After I jumped out of bed I took a good look at our friend. There he (I assumed) was, perched on a branch of the sugar maple tree, about six feet from our bedroom window. He was dipping his tail up and down, a phoebe gesture signaling health and vigor. As I watched this sparrow-size bird from up close, I noted his black cap, white throat bib, and dark gray back. He stretched