THE DANCE IN THE ALDER SWALE 103 



dozen or more holes where, in hunting worms, he 

 had plunged his bill into the earth up to his eyes 

 (up to the place where any other bird's eyes 

 would be). 



I had always wondered how, when he felt a 

 worm, he could open his bill with it forced far 

 down in stiff mud, for surely he does not thrust it 

 down already open! Year after year I kept on 

 wondering instead of trying to find out, until one 

 day some one showed me that there was a curious 

 flexible tip to the upper mandible which the bird 

 could move independently of the rest of the beak, 

 and thus could grasp the luckless worm, though 

 deep in the mud. 



We ought not to expect of a bird with such a 

 beak anything like a song. How could a bird with 

 a hooked beak or a flat beak or a long hinged beak 

 sing I It is not for his singing that I should miss 

 Woodcock in the swale, but for his dancing. No 

 dance fires among the Indians' tepees, no bar- 

 becue among the colored people's cabins, no folk 

 dance the world over was ever wilder or more 

 frenzied than the dance of the woodcock among 

 the alders, night after night in the early spring. 



I said that Woodcock does not sing. He does 

 harp, however, his own accompaniment a weird 



