Scolopax minor

It was an unusually cold Saturday night, but damn it, it was spring, and the timberdoodles were in town. We went out to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge to listen for them. The American woodcock, Scolopax minor, as it is more formally known, is a shorebird that isn’t. It is related to the sandpipers, and looks somewhat similar to snipe, but it favors woodlands and thickets and swamps as habitat. They have a very long beak that they use to probe for earthworms and other invertebrates. As ground birds, they are cryptically marked and hard to see. Unless you flush one, you are unlike to see one. (Here’s a picture taken by my friend Rob Jett, the City Birder: note the large eyes set back on the head.) Here in the city, every once and a while, one unfortunately hits a skyscraper on migration or lands in some place like Bryant Park. I saw my first one in Green-Wood Cemetery some years back. I wouldn’t have noticed it if it hadn’t bolted out of the leaves in front of me. There’s no hunting in NYC, of course, but woodcocks are one of the few shorebirds that are legally hunted in season.

In the spring, woodcocks become vocal. The males go into their courtship rituals: at dawn and dusk, they call and give flight displays. First they call, a sound usually described as a “peent,” a buzzy beeping to other ears. Listen here. After calling, they fly, and their wings, specially structured, make a twittering sound that they mix with chirps.

This was birding solely by ear. Sometimes, you can spot them as they move from the edges of the scrub into the meadows, pastures, and fields that they will fly up from. Not Saturday. Our adventure was all aural. The sun, floridly orange-red, set at 7:14 over the bay. Twilight lasted a good 45 minutes after that. There was a 3/4 moon in the sky, endless planes out of nearby JFK, the howl of Cross Bay Blvd. And did I mention the cold? But still, after a time, came the “beent,” “beent,” “beent,” of a woodcock. Then the flutter of flight, a very liquid sound.

Right there in Queens, the timberdoodles were calling.