402 LAND-BIRDS AND GAME-BIRDS 



is extremely difficult to find the birds ; a few days later the 

 sportsman may easily find three or four broods of young with 

 one or both parents, where he may before have hunted by 

 inches without flushing a bird. Should he, however, patiently 

 search with his dog the dry grounds, he may find them, per- 

 haps ten yards, perhaps half a mile, from the wet swale which 

 he knows to be their favorite feeding-ground. The same is the 

 case in August ; also in winter (in districts of the South, where 

 in many localities which the writer has visited the birds may be 

 found in the ratio of ten to a township). In no part of the 

 country are there Woodcock enough to occupy the whole of it ; 

 they may resort to any part of the many thousand acres out- 

 side of the particular spot to which at particular times they 

 resort. While the young are feeble on the wing and their pa- 

 rents are with them, twelve birds may be found in summer in 

 a swale of two acres, but later they may be dispersed over 

 many hundred times that space. Their " borings " (small, 

 clean-cut holes made in soft earth by their bills) may still, 

 however, be seen in the same swale ; moreover, by patient 

 watching at evening, their shadowy forms may be detected, as 

 they pass to the swamp, or cross the roadway, and, by patient 

 search, the same twelve birds may be picked up one by one in 

 odd places. This fact the author has verified by experience, 

 when the temporary laws forbade the killing of the birds before 

 August fifteenth. Will any one who cannot gainsay these 

 facts still uphold the absurd old theory that Woodcock migrate 

 in summer? Since this so-called disappearance is a notorious 

 fact from Canada to the far South and West, we venture to ask 

 to what place the birds migrate ? To this there is no answer. 



The period of incubation is supposed to be sixteen days, but 

 it may be longer. As soon as the young are hatched, it be- 

 comes convenient and necessary that the whole family should 

 be in the immediate vicinity of a feeding-ground, and it is 

 asserted that the old birds frequently carry their young thither 

 in their bills. Their food now consists of various earth-worms, 

 which they obtain by probing the ground with their bills, evi- 

 dence of which may often be .found, usually in soft, black 



