Timberdoodle

Coming over from the barn last night, talking a bit to Alan, pleasantly tired, happy to be finished with chores... just past daylight...barely needed the flashlight. Suddenly something hurtled past my head on whistling wings, a speeding susurrus, silhouetted momentarily against the last orange glow in the west. Mourning dove, I thought, wow, she is out late.

Then, from the flat, grassy knoll up by the horse pasture pond it came....for the first time in at least fifteen years I heard a very special sound. The buzzy, rasping, nasal peent! of a male woodcock courting a mate. Ah, all became clear... the feathery bullet was his lady friend heading elsewhere in a heck of a hurry.

We have a dancer! Big news! I was thrilled. Indeed cold shivers ran up and down my arms. Alan made fun of me, saying that they (woodcocks, that is) are all over the back of the farm; all I have to do is walk out there to see one. However, he has never heard the dance and doesn't understand that watching one bomb through the bushes like a flying rocket or hearing one dance are not the same thing. Not the same at all.

It was too cold last night, I was too tired, it was too dark. But (if he stays) Alan and I will tiptoe up to the pond one night soon to watch and listen to the magical sky dance. If we are lucky, Mr. Timberdoodle will spiral skyward, then hurtle to earth piping the ethereal mating whistle that makes these fat, pointy-nosed little birds a ghostly springtime wonder. It is such a special thing that you almost feel guilty watching...like you were in some one else's church or something. Once he stands there in the darkness, hearing that other-worldly song, I think my boy will know what I mean about timberdoodles though.

I had never seen the sky dance and didn't know of it at all until I read A Sand County Almanac in college, having grabbed it off the college bookstore shelf because it had a pretty cover. (Now there was a life changing moment....all these years later and I still think of the things I read there, especially how chickadees come to folks who cut firewood...looking for insects. (They do btw.) You just never know when an important book will sort of jump off the shelf at you and change your way of looking at the world.)

Later someone important to me at that time in my life found a dancing ground across the road from my camp in Caroga Lake. We sat on the tail gate of my pick up truck in the driveway, every single clear night, swatting mosquitoes and watching the dance as the sun went down. I didn't have a TV then and didn't miss it either.
When I moved down here to the valley, there was another dancer who regularly performed on the heifer pasture flats behind the house. Then a few years ago he left for some reason and I never heard another until last night.

Now we have a possible avian thespian setting up stage out by the pond, which is already one of my favorite places on the farm.
I hope he stays.