Emergency Timberdoodling

Another voice says, There couldn’t be a more

splendid world, and here I am

existing in it.

I think, just for the joy of it, I’ll fly.

I believe I could.

And yet another voice says, Can we come down

from the clouds now?

And some other voice answers, Okay.

But only for a while.

~Mary Oliver

Having spent a long, cold, blustery day at a women’s outdoor skills workshop trying to tie knots, rig up shelters, and start bow-drill fires with frozen fingers, I stepped out of my mucky boots, into a blessedly quiet house, focused solely on the hot shower awaiting me. I had barely begun to peel off my wet jacket when a raucous and repetitive thumping suddenly made the door quake, and from the other side of it came the shout every parent dreads.

“Mom! Quick! Emergency!” I leaped for the doorknob even as my stomach leaped for my throat.

But as soon as I flung the door opened, my panic changed to anger at seeing the wily smiles on my kids’ faces. Hadn’t we taught them to reserve the word “emergency” only for real emergencies? Just as I had begun to subject them, yet again, to that lecture, they said, “Mom, get your boots back on. Woodcock in the meadow!”

Both anger and exhaustion dissolved by excitement, I stuffed my feet back into my damp boots and followed my kids into the meadow behind our woods for a child-led evening of “timberdoodling.”

Many of us have learned to anticipate the reappearance of Robins and Bluebirds as among the first signs of spring. However, as climate change shifts phenology, these birds appear to overwinter in Vermont in greater numbers each year. But Woodcock, known colloquially by their nickname, “Timberdoodle,” continue to migrate farther south and return northward to their breeding grounds just as the vernal equinox gifts us brighter, warmer days.

That night, I bushwhacked (an activity for which I require a lot of incentive) through the brambles in our woods, balancing on slippery logs over a flooded meadow, and emerged in our neighbor’s hay field. “Mom, try to walk wider so your rain pants aren’t so loud,” said my daughter. “Slide your feet through the mud instead of tromping in it, so you walk quieter.” The three of us contended with the inner conflict of wanting to both see the elusive birds and avoid disturbing them. To, somehow, achieve both presence and absence—or the illusion of absence—at once. We wanted invisibility, knowing full well we weren’t fooling anyone, least of all, the Woodcock.

It is the Woodcock, after all, who is the master of camouflage. Smaller than a crow but much larger than a Robin, this “woodland shorebird” hides a round torso, long legs, and spear-like bill beneath the dense woodland leaf litter so expertly that they are nearly impossible to spot by day. But on early spring nights, if you’re quiet enough, the woodcock will often grant you a front seat to his elaborate courting ritual.

Camouflaged Woodcock's eye-view is a photograph by Asbed Iskedjian, courtesy of pixels.com

It’s a spectacle we watched here in Cornwall for the first time last year, but at a location farther from my house. That year, I guided my family. But this year, my children guided me. By the time we reached the clearing behind our meadow, dusk had fallen. That’s when the woodcock chanted its metronomic call, a nasal peent! We stood shin-deep in dead, wet swale grass until the peent gave way to the trills and warbles of woodcock wings spiraling hundreds of feet into the clouds. Only then did we swish through the field to where we heard the Woodcock’s last Peent!, hoping they would land—as they sometimes do—right in front of their audience. (You have to wonder, in moments like these, if it is we and not the woodcock who are “the spectacle.”)

Who is all their strutting, all this dancing in and out of the clouds, really for? Why, the female Woodcock, of course. Woodcock, not unlike humans, pull out all the stops to claim their territory and find a mate. The survival of their species, like ours, depends on it. And, like us, they require a certain reverence and a modicum of privacy for this endeavor.

This time, the Woodcock did not land at our feet, as we had hoped. But that night they brought me out of hiding and, once again, into nature. They made me and my kids dance in the mud on the week of the vernal equinox. Maybe this was, in fact, an emergency. A joy emergency.

When words alone can't describe...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCpDVWOw3gg

NBNC “How to Timberdoodle”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfSYsN8lQ5o

“Woodcock Rumba”

A book I keep on my bedside table this time of year: