The American woodcock sees all around itself and flies slower than any bird
Nicknamed the timberdoodle, the American woodcock is a sandpiper that ditched the beach for damp thickets. Its eyes sit so high on its head that it can probably see a full circle around itself, and it holds the record for the slowest flight ever clocked in a bird, about 5 miles per hour.
Plump, short-legged and big-headed, an adult measures 10 to 12 inches and weighs 5 to 8 ounces, with females noticeably bigger. Its mottled brown, grey and black feathers blend into dead leaves. The real tool is a long bill whose tip can open and close while buried in the soil, thanks to a special arrangement of bone and muscle; a rough tongue and palate grip slippery earthworms, its main food. Most active at dawn and dusk, woodcocks sometimes walk with a slow rhythmic rocking. Some ornithologists think this coaxes worms upward, while Bernd Heinrich and others suspect it signals to predators that they have been spotted, since birds also rock on roads and snow where there is nothing to eat.
The species lives mainly east of the 98th meridian, breeding from Atlantic Canada to Manitoba and wintering around the Gulf Coast, with Alabama's northern half hosting the densest winter numbers. Migration happens at night, low and unhurried, at speeds of 16 to 28 miles per hour.
Spring brings a spectacle. At dusk a male calls a buzzy peent from a clearing, then spirals 50 to 100 yards up and tumbles back down in zigzags, air whistling through his outer wing feathers while he chirps. Males may keep this up for four months and mate with several hens, then take no part in family life. A hen lays usually four eggs in a scrape on the forest floor, and the downy chicks leave the nest within hours, flying reasonably well by three weeks.
An estimated 5 million make it North America's most common sandpiper, yet numbers have dropped about 1.1 percent a year for four decades as abandoned farmland matured into forest or became housing. A conservation plan published in 2008 set targets for recreating the young, brushy habitat the birds need.
Source: American woodcock
