THE AMERICAN WOODCOCK. 
17 
suaded, are much greater than is usually supposed. As it feeds by night, it 
is rarely met with by day, unless by a sportsman or gunner, who may be 
engaged in pursuing it for pleasure or pi’ofit. It is, however, killed in 
almost incredible numbers, from the beginning of July until late in winter, 
in different parts of the Union, and our markets are amply supplied with it 
during its season. You may at times see gunners returning from their sports 
with a load of Woodcocks, composed of several dozens ; nay, adepts in the 
sport have been known to kill upwards of a hundred in the course of a day, 
being assisted by relays of dogs, and perhaps a change of guns. In Lower 
Louisiana, they are slaughtered under night by men carrying lighted torches, 
which so surprise the poor things that they stand gazing on the light until 
knocked dead with a pole or cane. This, however, takes place only on the 
sugar and cotton plantations. 
At the time when the Woodcocks are travelling from the south towards 
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 might 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 a Woodcock, with a velocity equalling 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. 
While travelling with my family, in the month of October, through New 
Brunswick and the northern part of the State of Maine, I saw the Wood- 
cocks returning southward, in equal numbers late in the evenings, and in the 
same continuous manner, within a few yards or even feet of the ground, on 
the roads or through the woods. 
This species finds itself accommodated in the warmer parts of the United 
States, as well as in high northern latitudes, during the breeding season : it 
is well known to reproduce in the neighbourhood of Savannah in Georgia, 
and near Charleston in South Carolina. My friend John Bachman has 
known thirty young ones, not yet fully fledged, to have been killed in the 
vicinity of the latter place in one day. I have never found its nest in 
Louisiana, but I have frequently fallen in with it in the States from Missis- 
sippi to Kentucky, in which latter country it breeds abundantly. In the 
Middle Districts, the Woodcock begins to pair in the end of March ; in the 
southern, a month earlier. At this season, its curious spiral gyrations, while 
ascending or descending along a space of fifty or more yards of height, in 
the manner described in the article on the Snipe, when it utters a note dif- 
Vol. YI. 3 
