62 BULLETIN 142, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



left it. It was out in the bright sunlight, crouched, walking about slowly 

 but continuously. It held its body in an unsteady wavering manner, and was 

 picking and digging about the roots of the short grass stubble, apparently 

 obtaining some food too small for us to determine. The piece of lawn where 

 the bird was operating was low and flat, adjacent to the edge of the water 

 where protected by a low bulkhead. The ground was slightly moist, perhaps 

 from seepage, which may have accounted for its presence. It was remarkably 

 unsuspicious, allowing us to crawl within 2 or 3 yards, before flying back 

 to alight under the shade of near-by trees ; but was a full-grown bird, strong 

 on the wing. 



I have, more than once, seen a woodcock crouching in the short 

 grass beside a country road, quite unconcerned as I drove past. I 

 have frequently seen one in my yard about the shrubbery and I re- 

 member seeing my father stand on his front piazza and shoot one 

 that was standing under an arborvitae hedge: Moist cornfields are 

 often favorite resorts for woodcocks in summer. 



Spring. — The woodcock is the first of our waders to migrate north 

 and one of the earliest of all our migrants, coming with the blue- 

 birds and the robins, as soon as winter has begun to loosen its grip. 

 The date depends on the weather and is very variable, for the bird 

 must wait for a thaw to unlock its food supply in the bogs and spring 

 holes. Walter H. Rich (1907) has known the woodcock to arrive 

 in Maine as early as February 10, and says that early birds find a 

 living about the big ant hills, until the alder covers are ready for 

 them. 



In Audubon's (1840) time the migration must have been very 

 heavy, for he says : 



At the time when the woodcocks are traveling from the south toward all 

 parts of the United States, on their way to their breeding places, these birds, 

 although they migrate singly, follow each other with such rapidity, that they 

 may be said to arrive in flocks, the one coming directly in the wake of the 

 other. This is particularly observable by a person standing on the eastern 

 banks of the Mississippi or the Ohio, in the evening dusk, from the middle of 

 March to that of April, when almost every instant there whizzes past him n 

 woodcock, with a velocity equaling that of our swiftest birds. See them flying 

 across and low over the broad stream ; the sound produced by the action of 

 their wings reaches your ear as they approach, and gradually dies away after 

 they have passed and again entered the woods. 



No such flights can be seen to-day, but we occasionally have a com- 

 paratively heavy migration; such a flight occurred in 1923 and is 

 thus described in some notes from Edward H. Forbush : 



The most remarkable occurrence of the past two months was the prevalence 

 of migrating woodcocks over a large part of southern New England and along 

 the coastal regions to Nova Scotia. The first woodcock was reported in Massa- 

 chusetts the last week in February and from the first week in March onward 

 woodcocks were noted in slowly increasing numbers over a large part of New 

 England. From March 22 to the first week in April the number of these birds 

 scattered through Connecticut and eastern Massachusetts was remarkable. At 



