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  4. Eurasian Woodcock (Scolopax rusticola)

Eurasian Woodcock (Scolopax rusticola)

There’s no point looking for a Woodcock on an estuary, nor even on the muddy margins of a pool. This is a wader with a very unusual habitat: the woodland floor. It lives a life of amazing secrecy, hidden under undergrowth for much of the time, sitting tight, protected by its intricate “leaf-litter” camouflage. It comes out mostly at night and in twilight. Should you flush it from the woodland floor in daylight, it will rocket away with a volley of wing-beats, twisting through the trees and far out of sight.

It is also quite impossible to creep up on a Woodcock without being detected. This is because the bird has a remarkable gift for surveillance. The eyes are placed high on the skull (so high, in fact, that the brain-case is below them), and very much to the sides. This means that, without turning its head, the Woodcock can see in a complete 360° circle around it, with some overlapping (“binocular”) vision immediately in front and behind. Its vision also covers everything above in the vertical plane. As a Woodcock probes its long bill into damp patches in the litter layer, finding all its food by touch, it can theoretically see everything around it.

Woodcocks primarily eat worms, plus a few beetles and other insects. Their main method of feeding is simply to find a patch of soft mud and probe into it. On occasion, though, worms are encouraged to come to the surface with a little pattering with the feet.

The breeding behaviour of the Woodcock is intriguing and unusual. Waders tend to be monogamous, polyandrous (the female mating with more than one male) or promiscuous, the latter implying no prolonged pair bond between the sexes. But the Woodcock employs a system known as successive polygyny, in which a male will have several mates (up to four), yet spends a respectable amount of time with each one. This period probably only adds up to a few days, but it is long enough to ensure that a female is disinclined to call the attention of any other male.

To obtain a mate in the first place, a male undertakes display flights at dawn and dusk. These flights are completely different to the usual rising and falling “switchback” flights of most waders; instead they follow a very wide circular course over the treetops, several kilometres long. On its way the male Woodcock adopts an odd flight style, with bursts of double wings beats giving an intermittent flickering appearance. It also gives a vocal accompaniment, a series of soft croaking notes terminating in a loud squeak. The whole performance is known as “roding”, and it catches the attention of any receptive females waiting below, who either fly up and join the male briefly and silently, or give a sneezing summoning call from down below. Either way, both sexes end up on the forest floor, enshrouded in the darkness, where they continue their courtship in privacy and secrecy.