Part 4

When midsummer arrives a curious change comes over Whitooweek; the slight family ties are broken, and the bird becomes a hermit indeed for the rest of the year. He lives entirely alone, and not even in the migrating season does he join with his fellows in any large numbers, as most other birds do; and no one, so far as I know, has ever seen anything that might be appropriately called a flock of woodcock. The only exception to this rule that I know is when, on rare occasions, you surprise a male woodcock strutting on a log, like a grouse, spreading wings and tail, and hissing and sputtering queerly as he moves up and down. Then, if you creep near, you will flush two or three other birds that are watching beside the log, or in the underbrush close at hand. One hunter told me recently that his setter once pointed a bird on fallen log, that ceased his strutting as soon as he was discovered and slipped down into the ferns. When the dog drew nearer, five woodcock flushed at the same moment, the greatest number that I have ever known being found together.

When I asked the unlearned hunter--who was yet wise in the ways of the woods--the reason for Whitooweek's strutting at this season, after the families have scattered, he had no theory or explanation. "Just a queer streak, same's most birds have, on'y queerer," he said, and let it go at that. I have seen the habit but once, and then imperfectly, for I blundered upon two or three birds and flushed them before I could watch the performance. It is certainly not to win his mate, for the season for that is long past; and unless it be a suggestion of the grouse habit of gathering in small bands for a kind of rude dance, I am at a loss to account for it. Possibly play may appeal even to Whitooweek, as it certainly appeals to all other birds; and it is play alone that can make him forget he is a hermit.

With the beginning of the molt the birds desert the woods and swamps where they were reared and disappear absolutely. Whither they go at this time is a profound mystery. In places where there were a dozen birds yesterday there are none to-day; and when you do stumble upon one it is generally in a spot where you never found one before, and where you will probably not find another, though you haunt the spot for years. This is the more remarkable in view of the fact that the woodcock, like most other birds, has certain favored spots to which he returns, to nest or feed or sleep, year after year.

Occasionally at this season you may find a solitary bird on a dry southern hillside, or on the sunny edge of the big woods. He is pitiful now to behold, having scarcely any feathers left to cover him, and can only flutter or run away at your approach. If you have the rare fortune to surprise him now when he does not see you, you will note a curious thing. He stands beside a stump or brake where the sun can strike his bare back fairly, as if he were warming himself at nature's fireplace. His long bill rests its tip on the ground, as if it were a prop supporting his head. He is asleep; but if you crawl near and bring your glasses to bear, you will find that he sleeps with half an eye open. The lower lid seems to be raised till it covers half the eye; but the upper half is clear, so that as he sleeps he can watch above and behind for his enemies. He gives out very little scent at such times, and your keen-nosed dog, that would wind him at a stone's throw in the autumn, will now pass close by without noticing him, and must almost run over the bird before he draws to a point or shows any signs that game is near.

Hunters say that these scattered birds are those that have lost the most feathers, and that they keep to the sunny open spots for the sake of getting warm. Perhaps they are right; but one must still ask the question, what do these same birds do at night when the air is colder than by day? And, as if to contradict the theory, when you have found one bird on a sunny open hillside, you will find the next one a mile away asleep in the heart of a big corn-field, where the sun barely touches him the whole day long.

Whatever the reason for their action, these birds that you discover in July are rare, incomprehensible individuals. The bulk of the birds disappear, and you cannot find them. Whether they scatter widely to dense hiding-places and by sitting close escape discovery, or whether, like some of the snipe, they make a short northern migration in the molting season in search of solitude and a change of food, is yet to be discovered. For it is astonishing how very little we know of a bird that nests in our cow pasture and that often visits our yards and lawns nightly, but whose acquaintance we make only when he is dead and served as a delicious morsel, hot on toast, on our dining-tables.

In the spring, while winning his mate, Whitooweek has one habit which, when seen at the edge of the alder patch, reminds you instantly of the grass-plovers of the open moors and uplands, and of their wilder namesakes of the Labrador barrens. Indeed, in his fondness for burned plains, where he can hide in plain sight and catch no end of grasshoppers and crickets without trouble to vary his diet, and in a swift changeableness and fearlessness of man, Whitooweek has many points in common with the almost unknown plovers. In the dusk of the evening, as you steal along the edge of the woods, you will hear a faint _peenk, peenk_ close beside you, and as you turn to listen and locate the sound a woodcock slants swiftly up over your head and begins to whirl in a spiral towards the heavens, clucking and twittering ecstatically. It is a poor kind of song, not to be compared with that of the oven-bird or grass-plover, who do the same thing at twilight, and Whitooweek must help his voice by the clicking of his wings and by the humming of air through them, like the sharp voice of a reed in windy weather; but it sounds sweet enough, no doubt, to the little brown mate who is standing perfectly still near you, watching and listening to the performance. At an enormous height, for him, Whitooweek whirls about madly for a few moments and then retraces his spiral downwards, clucking and twittering the while, until he reaches the tree-tops, where he folds his wings directly over his mate and drops like a plummet at her head. Still she does not move, knowing well what is coming, and when within a few feet of the ground Whitooweek spreads his wings wide to break his fall and drops quietly close beside her. There he remains quite still for a moment, as if exhausted; but the next moment he is strutting about her, spreading wings and tail like a wild turkey-gobbler, showing all his good points to the best advantage, and vain of all his performances as a peacock in the spring sunshine. Again he is quiet; a faint _peent, peent_ sounds, as if it were a mile away; and again Whitooweek slants up on swift wings to repeat his ecstatic evolutions.

Both birds are strangely fearless of men at such times; and if you keep still, or move very softly if you move at all, they pay no more attention to you than if you were one of the cattle cropping the first bits of grass close at hand. Like the golden plover, whose life is spent mostly in the vast solitudes of Labrador and Patagonia, and whose nature is a curious mixture of extreme wildness and dense stupidity, they seem to have no instinctive fear of any large animal; and whatever fear Whitooweek has learned is the result of persistent hunting. Even in this he is slower learn than any other game bird, and when let alone for a little season promptly returns to his native confidence.

When the autumn comes you will notice another suggestion of the unknown plover in Whitooweek. Just as you look confidently for the plover's arrival in the first heavy northeaster after August 20, so the first autumn moon that is obscured by heavy fog will surely bring the woodcock back to his accustomed haunts again. But why he should wait for a full moon, and then for a chill mist to cover it, before beginning his southern flight is one of the mysteries. Unlike the plovers that come by hundreds, and whose eerie cry, shrilling above the roar of the storm and the rush of rain, brings you out of your bed at midnight to thrill and listen and thrill again, Whitooweek slips in silent and solitary; and you go out in the morning, as to an appointment, and find him sleeping quietly just where you expected him to be.

With the first autumn flight another curious habit comes out, namely, that Whitooweek has a fondness for certain spots, not for any food or protection they give him, but evidently from long association, as a child loves certain unkempt corners of an upland pasture above twenty other more beautiful spots that one would expect him to like better. Moreover, the scattered birds, in some unknown way, seem to keep account of the place, as if it were an inn, and so long as they remain in the neighborhood will often keep this one particular spot filled to its full complement.

Some three miles north of where I write there is a certain small patch of tall open woods that a few hunters have known and tended for years, while others passed by carelessly, for it is the least likely looking spot for game in the whole region. Yet if there is but a single woodcock in all Fairfield County, in these days of many hunters and few birds, the chances are that he will be there; and if you do not find one there on the first morning after a promising spell of weather, you may be almost certain that the flight is not yet on, or has passed you by. Several times after flushing a solitary woodcock in this spot I have gone over the whole place to find some reason for Whitooweek's strange fancy; but all in vain. The ground is open and stony, with hardly a fern or root or grass tuft to shelter even a woodcock; and look as closely as you will you can find no boring or sign of Whitooweek's feeding. From all external appearances it is the last spot where you would expect to find such a bird, and there are excellent covers close at hand; yet here is where Whitooweek loves to lie during the day, and to this spot he will return as long as there are any woodcock left. Hunters may harry the spot to-day and kill the few rare birds that still visit it; but to-morrow, if there be any birds in the whole neighborhood, there will be practically the same number just where the first were killed.

I have questioned old gunners about this spot,--which I discovered by flushing two woodcock at a time when none were to be found, though they were searched for by a score of young hunters and dogs,--and find that it has been just so as long as they can remember. Years ago, when the birds were plenty and little known, five or six might be found here on a half-acre at any time during the flight. If these were killed off, others took their places, and the supply seemed to be almost a constant quantity as long as there were birds enough in the surrounding coverts to draw upon; but why they haunt this spot more than others, and why the vacant places are so quickly filled, are two questions that no man can answer.

One hunter suggests to me, doubtfully, that possibly this may be accounted for by the migrating birds that are moving southward during the flight, and that drop into the best unoccupied places; and the same explanation will occur to others. The objection to this is that the birds migrate by night, and by night this spot is always unoccupied. The woodcock use it for a resting-place only by day, and by night they scatter widely to the feeding-grounds, whither also the migrating birds first make their way; for Whitooweek must feed often, his food being easily digested, and can probably make no sustained flights. He seems to move southward by easy stages, feeding as he goes; and so the new-comers would meet the birds that lately occupied the spot on the feeding-grounds, if indeed they met them at all, and from there would come with them at daylight to the resting-places they had selected. But how do the new-comers, who come by night, learn that the favored spots are already engaged by day, or that some of the birds that occupied them yesterday are now dead and their places vacant?

The only possible explanation is either to say that it is a matter of chance--which is no explanation at all, and foolish also; for chance, if indeed there be any such blind unreasonable thing in a reasonable world, does not repeat itself regularly--or to say frankly that there is some definite understanding and communication among the birds as they flit to and fro in the night; which is probably true, but obviously impossible to prove with our present limited knowledge.

This fondness for certain spots shows itself in another way when you are on the trail of the hermit. When flushed from a favorite resting-place and not shot at, he makes but a short flight, up to the brush tops and back again, and then goes quietly back to the spot from which he rose as soon as you are gone away. He has also the hare trick of returning in a circle to his starting-point; and occasionally, when you flush a bird and watch sharply, you may see him slant down on silent wings behind you and light almost at your heels. Once my old dog Don started a woodcock and remained stanchly pointing at the spot where he had been. I remained where I was, a few yards in the rear, and in a moment Whitooweek whirled in from behind and dropped silently into some brakes between me and the dog and not ten feet from the old setter's tail. The ruse succeeded perfectly, for as the scent faded away from Don's nose he went forward, and so missed the bird that was watching him close behind. This curious habit may be simply the result of Whitooweek's fondness for certain places; or it may be that by night he carefully selects the spot where he can rest and hide during the day, and returns to it because he cannot find another so good while the sun dazzles his eyes; or it may be a trick pure and simple to deceive the animal that disturbs him, by lighting close behind where neither dog nor man will ever think of looking for him.

By night, when he sees perfectly and moves about rapidly from one feeding-ground to another, Whitooweek is easily dazzled by a light of any kind, and he is one of the many creatures that come and go within the circle of your jack. Because he is silent at such times, and moves swiftly, he is generally unnamed--just a night bird, you think, and let him pass without another thought. Several times when jacking, to see what birds and animals I might surprise and watch by night, I have recognized Whitooweek whirling wildly about my circle of light. Once, deep in the New Brunswick wilderness, I surprised two poachers spearing salmon at midnight with a fire-basket hung over the bow of their canoe. Spite of its bad name it is a magnificent performance, skillful and daring beyond measure; so instead of driving them off I asked for a seat in their long dugout to see how it was done. As we swept up and down the dangerous river, with pitch-pine blazing and cracking and the black shadows jumping about us, two woodcock sprang up from the shore and whirled madly around the pirogue. One brushed my face with his wings, and was driven away only when Sandy in the bow gave a mighty lunge of his spear and with a howl of exultation flung a twenty-pound, kicking salmon back into my lap. But several times that night I saw the flash of their wings, or heard their low surprised twitter above the crackle of the fire and the rush and roar of the rapids.

When he finds good feeding grounds on his southern migrations Whitooweek will stay with us, if undisturbed, until a sharp frost seals up his storehouse by making the ground too hard for his sensitive bill to penetrate. Then he slips away southward to the next open spring or alder run. Not far away, on Shippan Point, is a little spring that rarely freezes and whose waters overflow and make a green spot even in midwinter. The point is well covered with houses now, but formerly it was good woodcock ground, and the little spring always welcomed a few of the birds with the welcome that only a spring can give. Last year, at Christmas time, I found a woodcock there quite at home, within a stone's throw of two or three houses and with snow lying deep all around him. He had lingered there weeks after all other birds had gone, either held by old associations and memories of a time when only the woodcock knew the place; or else, wounded and unable to fly, he had sought out the one spot in all the region where he might live and be fed until his wing should heal. Nature, whom men call cruel, had cared for him tenderly, healing his wounds that man had given, and giving him food and a safe refuge at a time when all other feeding-grounds were held fast in the grip of winter; but men, who can be kind and reasonable, saw no deep meaning in it all. The day after I found him a hunter passed that way, and was proud of having killed the very last woodcock of the season.

A WOODCOCK GENIUS

There is one astonishing thing about Whitooweek which can scarcely be called a habit, but which is probably the discovery of one or two rare individuals here and there more original than their fellows. Like the eider-ducks and the bear and the beaver, Whitooweek sometimes uses a rude kind of surgery for binding up his wounds. Twenty years ago, while sitting quietly by a brook at the edge of the woods in Bridgewater, a woodcock suddenly fluttered out into the open and made his way to a spot on the bank where a light streak of sticky mud and clay showed clearly from where I was watching. It was the early hunting season and gunners were abroad in the land, and my first impression was that this was a wounded bird that had made a long flight after being shot, and that had now come out to the stream to drink or to bathe his wound. Whether this were so or not is a matter of guesswork; but the bird was acting strangely in broad daylight, and I crept nearer till I could see him plainly on the other side of the little stream, though he was still too far away for me to be absolutely sure of what all his motions meant.

At first he took soft clay in his bill from the edge of the water and seemed to be smearing it on one leg near the knee. Then he fluttered away on one foot for a short distance and seemed to be pulling tiny roots and fibers of grass, which he worked into the clay that he had already smeared on his leg. Again he took more clay and plastered it over the fibers, putting on more and more till I could plainly see the enlargement, working away with strange, silent intentness for fully fifteen minutes, while I watched and wondered, scarce believing my eyes. Then he stood perfectly still for a full hour under an overhanging sod, where the eye could with difficulty find him, his only motion meanwhile being an occasional rubbing and smoothing of the clay bandage with his bill, until it hardened enough to suit him, whereupon he fluttered away from the brook and disappeared in the thick woods.

I had my own explanation of the incredible action, namely, that the woodcock had a broken leg, and had deliberately put it into a clay cast to hold the broken bones in place until they should knit together again; but naturally I kept my own counsel, knowing that no one would believe in the theory. For years I questioned gunners closely, and found two who said that they had killed woodcock whose legs had at one time been broken and had healed again. As far as they could remember, the leg had in each case healed perfectly straight instead of twisting out to one side, as a chicken's leg does when broken and allowed to knit of itself. I examined hundreds of woodcock in the markets in different localities, and found one whose leg had at one time been broken by a shot and then had healed perfectly. There were plain signs of dried mud at the break; but that was also true of the other leg near the foot, which only indicated that the bird had been feeding in soft places. All this proved nothing to an outsider, and I kept silence as to what I had seen until last winter, twenty years afterwards, when the confirmation came unexpectedly. I had been speaking of animals before the Contemporary Club of Bridgeport when a gentleman, a lawyer well known all over the state, came to me and told me eagerly of a curious find he had made the previous autumn. He was gunning one day with a friend, when they shot a woodcock, which on being brought in by the dog was found to have a lump of hard clay on one of its legs. Curious to know what it meant he chipped the clay off with his penknife and found a broken bone, which was then almost healed and as straight as ever. A few weeks later the bird, had he lived, would undoubtedly have taken off the cast himself and there would have been nothing to indicate anything unusual about him.

So I give the observation now, at last, since proof is at hand, not to indicate a new or old habit of Whitooweek,--for how far the strange knowledge is spread among the woodcock and the wading birds no man can say,--but simply to indicate how little we know of the inner life of the hermit, and indeed of all wild birds, and how much there is yet to be discovered when we shall lay aside the gun for the field-glass and learn to interpret the wonderful life which goes on unseen all about us.

WHEN UPWEEKIS GOES HUNTING

Late one winter afternoon, when the sun was gilding the pines on the western mountains and the shadows stretched long and chill through the snow-laden woods, a huge bull moose broke out of the gloom of the spruces and went swinging up the long, sunlit barren at a stride whose length and power would have discouraged even a wolf from following. Five minutes later I came out of the same tunnel under the spruces just as the fringe of green across the barren swished back to cover the flanks of the plunging bull, and then nodded and nodded in twenty directions--_This way! that way! here! yonder!_--to mislead any that might follow on his track. For at times even the hemlocks and the alders and the waters and the leaves and the creaking boughs and the dancing shadows all seem to conspire to shield the innocent Wood Folk from the hostile eyes and hands of those that pursue them. And that is one reason why it is so hard to see game in the woods.

The big moose had fooled me that time. When he knew that I was following him he ran far ahead, and then circled swiftly back to stand motionless in a hillside thicket within twenty yards of the trail that he had made scarcely an hour agone. There he could see perfectly, without being seen, what it was that was following him. When I came by, following swiftly and silently the deep tracks in the snow, he let me pass below him while he took a good look and a sniff at me; then he glided away like a shadow in the opposite direction. Unfortunately a dead branch under the snow broke with a dull snap beneath his cautious hoof, and I turned aside to see--and so saved myself the long tramp up and down the cunning trails. When he saw that his trick was discovered he broke away for the open barren, with all his wonderful powers of eye and ear and tireless legs alert to save himself from the man whom he mistook for his deadly enemy.

It was of small use to follow him further, so I sat down on a prostrate yellow birch to rest and listen awhile in the vast silence, and to watch anything that might be passing through the cold white woods.