sky dance

Last night, after I got off of work, I rode my bicycle out to the arboretum to see a a woodcock dance. I was really worried that I would get there after he had finished and miss the spectacular display, but as I walked up to the meadow where I thought he would be, I could here his chirping. I sat there for about half an hour before he started to dance and then watched his dance for at least an hour and a half. It was very dark (10:30) when I finished the trip home, but it was totally worth it. Because I cannot explain (without a very embarassing demonstration) what happens during this dance, here is an exerpt from Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (a much more eloquent description then I would be capable of):

I owned my farm for two years before learning that the sky dance is to be seen over my woods every evening in April and May. Since we discovered it, my family and I have been reluctant to miss even a single performance.



The show begins on the first warm evening in April at exactly 6:50 pm. The curtain goes up one minute later each day until 1 June when the time is 7:50. This sliding scale is dictated by vanity, the dancer demanding a romantic light intensity of exactly 0.05 foot candles. Do not be late, and sit quietly, lest he fly away in a huff.



The stage props, like the opening hours, reflect the temperamental demands of the performer. The stage must be an open amphitheater in woods or brush, and in its center there must be a mossy spot, a streak of sterile sand, a bare outcrop of rock, or a bare roadway. Why the male woodcock should be such a stickler for a bare dance floor puzzled me at first, but I now think it is a matter of legs. The woodcock's legs are short and his struttings cannot be executed to advantage in dense grass or weeds, nor could his lady see them there. I have more woodcocks than most farmers because I have more mossy sand, too poor to support grass.



Knowing the place and the hour, you can seat yourself under a bush to the east of the dance floor and wait, watching against the sunset for the woodcock's arrival. He flies in low from some neighboring thicket, alights on the bare moss, and at once begins the overture: a series of queer throaty peents spaced about two seconds apart, and sounding much like the summer call of the nighthawk.



Suddenly the peenting ceases and the bird flutters skyward in a series of wide spirals, emitting a musical twitter. Up and up he goes, the spirals steeper and smaller, the twittering louder and louder, until the performer is only a speck in the sky. Then, without warning, he tumbles like a crippled plane, giving voice in a soft liquid warble that a March bluebird might envy. At a few feet from the ground he levels off and returns to his peenting ground, usually to the exact spot where the performance began, and there resumes his peenting.



It is soon too dark to see the bird on the ground, but you can see his fight against the sky for an hour, which is the usual duration of the show. On moonlight nights, however, it may continue, at intervals, as long as the moon continues to shine.



At daybreak the whole show is repeated. In early April the final curtain falls at 5:15 am; the time advances two minutes a day until June, when the performance closes for the year at 3:15. Why the disparity in sliding scale? Alas, I fear that even romance tires, for it takes only a fifth as much light to stop the sky dance at dawn as suffices to start it at sunset.



It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any one of them. What I do not yet know about the sky dance is: where is the lady, and just what part, if any, does she play? I often see two woodcocks on a peenting ground, and the two sometimes fly together, but they never peent together. Is the second bird the hen or rival male?



Another unknown: is the twitter vocal, or is it mechanical? My friend, Bill Fenney, once clapped a net over a peenting bird and removed is outer primary wing feathers; thereafter it peented and warbled, but twittered no more. But one such experiment is hardly conclusive.



Another unknown: up to what stage of nesting does the male continue the sky dance? My daughter once saw a bird peenting within twenty yards of a nest containing hatched eggshells, but was this his lady's nest? Or is this secretive fellow possibly bigamous without our ever having found it out? These, and many other questions, remain mysteries of the deepening dusk.



The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They life on the land, but not by the land.



The woodcock is a living refutation of the theory that the utility of a game bird is to serve as a target, or to pose gracefully on a slice of toast. No one would rather hunt woodcock in October than I, but since learning of the sky dance I find myself calling one or two bird enough. I must be sure that come April, there be no dearth of dancers in the sunset sky.



My friend Reid and I are riding back to the arboretum tomorrow night because his dance is rather addicting. We are going to try and hide in the bushes next to where he peens so we can be very close to him.

Did I mention yet that for my vertebrate biology class our first assignment is to memorize 50 bird calls and about 12 frog calls and that we go to the arboretum at dawn on saturdays to go bird watching? It's pretty much the coolist thing in the world. Now when I walk around campus or through the woods I have a completely different experience because I pay so much more attention to the sounds that are present. It still baffles my mind that sometimes I can identify them. I love biology!