UNITY, Maine — Saturday night about a dozen people quietly crept through low brush in hopes of seeing a small bird fly wildly 200 feet in the air and shoot back down, whistling and chirping all the way.
“We’re probably a bunch of idiots standing out in the cold like this,” said observer Marge Hand of Belfast, laughing. “It’s an interesting bird — no other bird does a display like this.”
It’s mating season for the woodcock, and Maine is one of the migratory bird’s prime reproductive grounds.
To attract a female, a male woodcock — a chubby little long-billed shorebird that lives in forests — will stand on the ground in a field and “peent” about 20 minutes after sunset and in the dark early morning. After making the “peent” sound a dozen or so times, the bird will fly a steady upward curve until he is a few hundred feet in the air. His wings whistle in a twittering sound all the way up. When he is at the peak of his ascent, he lets out a few loud chirps before swooping down in several steep descents and taking his stance in the field to peent some more.
The mating season has started for the woodcock and will last through May, according to Dan McAuley, a wildlife biologist for the United States Geological Survey. He has studied woodcock for about 30 years, and gave a slide-show presentation Saturday evening about the bird at an event hosted by the Sebasticook Regional Land Trust before leading the group to the field.
McAuley showed how the bird has been decreasing in population since the 1960s, and explained that the bird needs a clear-cut habitat to do its mating ritual in, and also needs young forest to raise its chicks in. In the past 30 years, clear-cutting forest has become unpopular, which is hurting the species, McAuley said. He said in 1988 Maine clear-cut almost 103,000 acres in a year; by 2004 that figure dropped to about 19,000 acres clear-cut in a year.
It’s a mysterious bird, land trust director Jennifer Irving said. She hosted the expedition behind her farmhouse, the perfect location with a field for the bird to fly in and nearby forest to raise chicks in.
“Because they are so hard to see, they are often overlooked and people don’t know much about them, she said. “But they’re tremendously interesting birds in their appearance and their habits.”
Marge and Bud Hand had been looking for woodcock for a while, but they needed Saturday night’s seminar to instruct them on what to look for.
The bird can be elusive if the seeker doesn’t know what to listen for. Woodcocks’ peenting noises are easily mistaken for insect sounds.
“We haven’t figured out what they like [in a mating display] — we just know what they do,” McAuley whispered in the field at dusk.
McAuley said once the females have mated, they will create nests on the ground and sit there for 21 days before their eggs — usually four eggs per year in only one brood — will hatch. The female will leave her nest to mate with males, to make sure to keep them around in case something happens to her eggs. She also will leave to dig up earthworms for her chicks, who will eat their weight in worms daily.
For more information about the Sebasticook Regional Land Trust, formerly the Friends of Unity Wetlands, call 948-3766 or visit friendsofunitywetlands.org. All events are free.