84 BIRDS OF THE WAVE AND WOODLAND 



Strictly true, as woodcocks migrate by night, and guns out one 

 day in October that have not flushed a single cock, will the 

 next day make a bag. At one time the bird was so common 

 that weather forecasts were made from its habits, as in 

 Grahame's " sure harbinger when they so early come, of early 

 winter, tedious and severe," and Phillips' "the woodcocks 

 early visit and abode, of long continuance in our temp' rate 

 clime, foretell a lib'ral harvest." Earlier still, it was another 

 name for a fool, and in Elizabethan authors this synonym 

 for a stupid person occurs with other bird-nicknames with 

 tedious frequency — gnll, rook, cormorant — and they are to 

 be collected by the score without difficulty from, say, Nash 

 and Ben Jonson, showing how colloquial in Shakespeare's 

 day was the general familiarity with birds and their supposed 

 characteristics. When smoking was introduced into England, 

 one of the first names for the pipe was " the woodcock's 

 head," the stem being the beak. But why the bird should 

 have become a synonym for a witless person is nowadays 

 difficult to understand, for — except that it comes and goes as a 

 rule on the same tracks to and from its feeding-grounds, and 

 thus tells the trap-setter where to place his snares with dead- 

 liest effect — it is a singularly wary bird, and never taken off 

 its guard. 



And so we come to December, " the king of the months," 

 and its wren, "the king of the birds." \\1iy king? Because 

 it was once decided in a parliament of the birds, that the one 



