Woodcock

a game bird of the snipe family. The American species winters from the Ohio Valley southward to the Gulf. It nests in summer northward to Manitoba. It is a stoutly built bird about eleven inches in length, dark above and buff beneath. The female lays four buffy, rufous-spotted eggs in a leafy nest on the ground in the woods. The woodcock feeds at night, assisted, no doubt, by prominent button-like eyes. It has a long, slender bill, flexible and sensitive at the end like a finger, with which it probes rich, moist soil for earthworms. The woodcock is reluctant to take flight. When flushed it rises ten or twelve feet with a sudden spring, and drops plump into the undergrowth again. Sportsmen find it a difficult bird to bag. The European woodcock is a somewhat larger bird. It is found from England to Japan. Chambers is authority for a statement, to be found elsewhere as well, that the woodcock transports her young, one at a time, to feeding grounds by clasping it tightly between her thighs. In his boyhood Shakespeare was evidently familiar with this bird in the woods of the Avon, for in Hamlet he speaks of "springes to catch woodcock."

The American woodcock is the oddest looking land bird in North America. Its legs are too short for so large a body, its tail is only half as long as it should be, its neck is too short and too thick, and its head is entirely out of drawing. The eyes are placed too far back, and the bill is too long and too straight. In appearance, the woodcock looks like an avian caricature.--W. T. Hornaday.