It’s early spring in the North Woods, but it seems like late winter. The ground is a mix of snowy mud and muddy snow. In a few weeks a flannel shirt will suffice, but tonight it’s a winter coat and wool cap.
My best friend and I are sitting and waiting on the back porch at sunset, the temperature dropping with the light. He’s the third in a line of chocolate Labrador retrievers that can be traced directly back to the southeast corner of Waugh Hall a few minutes after my graduation from Wabash, a gift from two professors.
Iridescent wood ducks have returned to the creek behind the house. Soon our property will be filled with goldfinches, bluebirds, scarlet tanagers, indigo buntings, and a kaleidoscope of warblers with golden-wings, yellow throats, and chestnut sides. Once they arrive, they are obvious to even casual observers.
The objects of our affection this day are not obvious to anyone. They are mottled browns and grays. They ghosted into our woods before dawn and have been silently hidden in the leaf litter, the color and pattern of their feathers making them virtually invisible. They must be looked for intentionally and listened for intently.
We are watching for the American woodcock, a shorebird that got lost on its evolutionary journey and ended up in the woods. Along the way evolution gave them huge eyes, an almost upside-down brain, a long bill, enormous feet, almost no legs or neck at all, and three odd feathers on the tips of their wings.
My introduction to the woodcock and his sky dance was in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. I borrowed it from Wabash Professor Dave Krohne’s bookshelf for some evening reading during summer research. I didn’t see my first woodcock sky dance until March 19 in my senior year while visiting a friend in southwestern Michigan. It was darn cold that evening too.
But when I moved to Minnesota two decades ago I entered their world, and they mine.
our performer arrives unseen from the dark woods into the shadows of the forest edge. He begins with some strutting on the ground and a few nasally, buzzy calls described by most as a peent! He then launches himself skyward, spiraling up and up. Our eyes follow a silhouette for a few moments as he clears the treetops. When he’s lost in the dusk, our ears take over to follow him to the crest of his flight.
On this ascent he creates a twittering noise. As wind passes between those three narrow, odd feathers on the bird’s wingtips, they vibrate and make a sound unique in nature.
He plummets back to earth emitting a warbling call. Each flight lasts a minute or so, but on nights with a full moon, the birds may sky dance all night.
There are as many different descriptions of this dance as there are describers. Writers’ accounts of the ascent include “wings humming like taut wire,” “trilling and dancing with heartsick abandon,“ “he orbits under the first stars of evening.”
Witnesses of the downward plummet recall “a soft liquid warble that a March bluebird might envy,” “ventriloquial sound, difficult to locate, coming from everywhere and nowhere,” “falling through the sky like a gust-blown leaf,” and “zigzagging and parachuting back to earth like an autumn leaf on a soft breeze.”
No two people see the same thing in the sky dance. And maybe that’s the point. The sky dance occurs in the twilight, a shadow flitting among shadows. The twittering wing and warbling call are near the limits of hearing for many. Both sight and sound are at the edge of our perception and open to interpretation.
this is all hubris. They sky dance for the ladies, not us. Female woodcock is also watching, comparing, and choosing mates. We are watching the science of evolution expressed in the poetry of dance.
Although my education and career have been in the scientific field, watching woodcock at dusk inspires a dichotomy of worldviews—emotional and intellectual, irrational and rational, poet and scientist.
Sitting in the chill beside my best friend and watching these evolutionary oddities dancing in the sunset sky, I remember Edward Abbey’s words that hang over my writing desk—that a landscape can be understood best by “poets who have their feet planted in concrete—concrete data—and by scientists whose heads and hearts have not lost the capacity for wonder.”
GREG HOCH ’94 is the prairie habitat team supervisor for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. He is the author of Sky Dance of the Woodcock: The Habits and Habitats of a Strange Little Bird, published in 2019 by the University of Iowa Press.