A little brother to the bear, and other animal studies

by William J. Long

One day the boy found a strange bird under the door-step, a beautiful brown creature, as large as a pigeon, with a long, straight bill, and eyes at the top of its head. He took it to his father, a dogmatic man, who gave him a queer mixture of truth and nonsense as his portion of natural history. It was a blind snipe, he said; and there was some truth in that. It couldn't see because its eyes were out of place; it was a very scarce bird that appeared occasionally in the fall, and that burrowed in the mud for the winter instead of migrating,—and all this was chiefly nonsense.

When the boy took me to see his queer find I called it a woodcock and began to tell about it eagerly, but was stopped short and called a liar for my pains. A wordy war followed, in which Natty Dingle's authority was invoked in vain; and the boy, being bigger than I and in his own yard, drove me away at last for daring to tell him about a bird that his own cat had caught and that his own father had called a blind snipe. He pegged one extra stone after me for saying that there were plenty of them about, only they fed by night like owls, and another stone for shouting back that they did not burrow in the mud like turtles in dry weather, as his oracle had declared. And this untempered zeal is very much like what one generally encounters when he runs up against the prejudices of naturalists anywhere. Hear all they say,—that the earth is flat, that swallows spend the winter in the mud, that animals are governed wholly by instinct,—but don't quote any facts you may have seen until the world is ready for them. For it is better to call a thing a blind snipe, and know better, than to raise a family row and be hit on the head with a stone for calling it a woodcock.

The little woodcocks, though scarcely bigger than bumblebees, run about hardily, like young partridges, the moment they chip the shell, and begin at once to learn from the mother where to look for food. In the early twilight, when they are less wild and the mother is not so quick to flutter away and draw you after her, I have sometimes surprised a brood of them,—wee, downy, invisible things, each with a comically long bill and a stripe down his back that seems to divide the little fellow and hide one half of him even after you have discovered the other. The mother is with them, and leads them swiftly among the bogs and ferns and alder stems, where they go about turning over the dead leaves and twigs and shreds of wet bark with their bills for the grubs that hide beneath, like a family of rag-pickers each with a little stick to turn things over. Mother and chicks have a contented little twitter at such times that I have never heard under any other circumstances, which is probably intended to encourage each other and keep all the family within hearing as they run about in the twilight.

When the feeding-grounds are far away from the nest, as is often the case, Whitooweek has two habits that are not found, I think, in any other game birds—except perhaps the plover; and I have never been able to watch the young of these birds, though every new observation of the old ones serves to convince me that they are the most remarkable birds that visit us, and the least understood. When food must be hunted for at a long distance, the mother will leave her brood in hiding and go herself to fetch it. When she returns she feeds the chicks, like a mother dove, by putting her bill in their throats and giving each his portion, going and coming until they are satisfied, when she leaves them in hiding again and feeds for herself during the rest of the night. Like most other young birds and animals when left thus by their mothers, they never leave the spot where they have been told to stay, and can hardly be driven away from it until the mother returns. And generally, when you find a brood of young woodcock without the mother, they will let you pick them up and will lie as if dead in your hand, playing possum, until you put them down again.

When there is a good feeding-ground near at hand, yet too far for the little chicks to travel, the mother will take them there, one by one, and hide them in a secret spot until she has brought the whole family. Two or three times I have seen woodcock fly away with their young; and once I saw a mother return to the spot from which, a few moments before, she had flown away with a chick and take another from under a leaf where I had not seen him. This curious method is used by the mothers not only to take the young to favorable feeding-grounds, but also to get them quickly out of the way when sudden danger threatens, like fire or flood, from which it is impossible to hide.

So far as I can judge the process, which is always quickly done and extremely difficult to follow, the mother lights or walks directly over the chick and holds him between her knees as she flies. This is the way it seems to me after seeing it several times. There are those—and they are hunters and keen observers—who claim that the mother carries them in her bill, as a cat carries a kitten; but how that is possible without choking the little fellows is to me incomprehensible. The bill is not strong enough at the tip, I think, to hold them by a wing; and to grasp them by the neck, as in a pair of shears, and so to carry them, would, it seems to me, most certainly suffocate or injure them in any prolonged flight; and that is not the way in which wild mothers generally handle their little ones.

There is another possible way in which Whitooweek may carry her young, though I have never seen it. An old hunter and keen observer of wild life, with whom I sometimes roam the woods, once stumbled upon a mother woodcock and her brood by a little brook at the foot of a wild hillside. One of the chicks was resting upon the mother's back, just as one often sees a domestic chicken. At my friend's sudden approach the mother rose, taking the chick with her on her back, and vanished among the thick leaves. The rest of the brood, three of them, disappeared instantly; and the man, after finding one of them, went on his way without waiting to see whether the mother returned for the rest. I give the incident for what it is worth as a possible suggestion as to the way in which young woodcock are carried to and fro; but I am quite sure that those that have come under my own observation were carried by an entirely different method.

The young woodcock begin to use their tiny wings within a few days of leaving the eggs, earlier even than young quail, and fly in a remarkably short time. They grow with astonishing rapidity, thanks to their good feeding, so that often by early summer the family scatters, each one to take care of himself, leaving the mother free to raise another brood. At such times they travel widely in search of favorite food and come often into the farm-yards, spending half the night about the drains and stables while the house is still, and vanishing quickly at the first alarm; so that Whitooweek is frequently a regular visitor in places where he is never seen or suspected.