Life histories of North American shore birds, Part 1 (of 2)Bent, Arthur Cleveland
Science
Life histories of North American shore birds, Part 1 (of 2)
Bent, Arthur Cleveland
Birds -- Behavior; Shore birds -- North America
E. G. Taber (1904) found a nest that was situated in a swampy corner of
a field planted with corn, only 6 feet from the open, on a slightly
raised portion of the ground. This corner was overgrown with black ash,
soft maple, tag alders, and ferns, mingled with poison ivy. Mr. Brewster
(1925) describes two, of several, nests found near Umbagog Lake, Maine,
as follows:
One, containing four eggs, incubated perhaps as many days, was in
the face of a low mound partially overarched by balsam shrubs
surrounded on every side by pools of water, and some 80 yards from
the lake shore near the middle of swampy, second-growth woods made
up chiefly of aspen, red cherry, and yellow birch trees, 20 or 30
feet in height, beneath which grew alders rather abundantly. The
female woodcock flew up from her eggs at least 15 feet in advance
of me, and whistling faintly soared off over the tree tops to be
seen no more. I flushed a male about 50 yards from this nest.
Of the other he says:
It was at the edge of a little fern-grown opening, on a mound
covered with brakes flattened and bleached by winter snows, beneath
a balsam scarce 2 feet high, and not dense enough to afford much
concealment for the eggs which, indeed, caught my eye when I was 15
feet away, there being no bird on them.
Mr. Trostler (1893) writes:
Finding a nest one day, I disturbed the setting bird three times,
and again four times on the next day, and on the morning of the
third day I found that the birds had removed the eggs during the
night and placed them in a new nest about 8 feet away, where I
found the eggs. I had marked the eggs to avoid any mistake. The
second nest was a mere hollow in the mossy ground, and was in the
middle of an open place in tall marsh grass, while the first was
neatly cupped and lined with the above-mentioned vegetable down.
Another singular habit of the woodcock that I have never seen noted
is that of both birds setting upon the nest in wet or cold weather.
In doing this they huddle very close together and face in opposite
directions, and I have always noted that they have their heads
thrown back and their bills elevated to an angle of about
forty-five degrees.
Mr. Nichols writes to me:
On Long Island there is a favorite nesting station for woodcock,
where the woodland gives place to broad fields, separated by narrow
stands of big trees with a sparse tangled undergrowth of shrubbery
and cat-brier, and where here and there a short fresh-water creek
extends inland from the not distant bay.
Several writers have stated or implied that the woodcock raises two
broods in a season. This would be an exception to the rule among waders.
I believe that it normally nests early and that the late nests are
merely second attempts at raising a brood, where the first nest has been
destroyed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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