THE WOODCOCK 289 



attend the thrust. How thoroughly the ground is searched is attested 

 by the holes which riddle the ground where woodcock and snipe 

 have been feeding. These show that the bird commonly walks a few 

 steps, then thrusts all round him, leaving a semicircle of holes at each 

 stopping-place. 



But besides worms, and the insects, Crustacea and small Mollusca 

 picked up among dead leaves, it does not seem to be generally 

 known that woodcock are by no means averse to searching the 

 patches of cow-dung common in their haunts. On this subject Mr. 

 G. Brooksbank, a keen and most observant ornithologist, writes me 

 that the presence of woodcock in the neighbourhood can always be 

 detected by the marks of their peculiar proddings in such patches. 

 These proddings "can always be distinguished from those of the 

 curlew, snipe, rooks, and starlings or even the little hole made by 

 some tiny bird, I think a wren. This is one of the lessons that a wood- 

 cock shooter must learn early, and also to recognise their droppings 

 and many keepers miss these signs of woodcocks' presence." 



But it is not enough to say that the victim is caught by thrust- 

 ing down the beak into the soil, for in the first place, as we 

 have already remarked, the search for food is accompanied by 

 a stamping of the feet, and this is followed by rapid movements of 

 the beak backwards and forwards, at the end of the thrust, a 

 fact which seems first to have been noticed by Macgillivray. 1 

 This is a peculiarly interesting observation, for most of us know that 

 worms are strangely disturbed by the rotatory movements of a stick 

 thrust into the ground, which will invariably, sooner or later, bring 

 worms to the surface all round the seat of disturbance. Nor is this 

 all, for the actual capture is dependent in part upon the sensitiveness 

 of the tip of the beak, and in part by a curious mechanism of this tip, 

 which, it may be remarked, is shared also by the snipe and dunlin 

 and other Limicolce which obtain their food by probing. Briefly, when 

 the thrust is made the beak is closed, at the end of the thrust, by the 



1 Macgillivray, British Birds, vol. iv. p. 392. 



