Woodcock
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
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.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The natural history in Aiton's 1910 account holds up: the flexible, sensitive bill, the night feeding, the four buff eggs in a leafy ground nest, the explosive flush. What has moved is the bird's fortunes and the attention paid to its courtship. Standardized singing-ground counts begun in 1968 have tracked the American woodcock down by roughly one percent a year, blamed mainly on the loss of the young, scrubby forest it needs, and hunting seasons and bag limits are now tightly regulated where Hornaday's sportsmen shot freely. The spiralling twilight "sky dance" of the displaying male, made famous by Aldo Leopold in 1949, is now the bird's best-known trait, and satellite and radio tags have replaced guesswork about its migration routes; the old tale, credited here to Chambers, of a mother carrying young clasped between her thighs is treated cautiously today, reported occasionally for the European woodcock but rarely confirmed.
Written for this edition, 2026.