Spring is here. American woodcocks have arrived.
Woodcocks are amusing birds. They look like they were assembled from the spare parts of other birds. They are chunky, short-legged, long-billed and painted the color of leaf litter. And that’s just the beginning.
The long bill is designed specifically to pull earthworms from the soil, as if the birds were using chopsticks. But think about that for a moment. If you bound two chopsticks together and pushed them into tight earth, how could you open them to snatch a meal?
The woodcock solves that problem by having a flexible mandible at the tip of its bill. It opens just enough to grab a worm. Since most of its food is on or beneath the ground, the woodcock does not need long legs to reach anything. Typically, a bird that feeds with its head down is vulnerable to surprise attack from above. The eyes on a woodcock are placed so far back on its head that the bird can see behind itself. No other North American bird looks like this.
Except for the Wilson’s snipe. Snipes forage in mud similarly to the way woodcocks forage in soil, so they face similar feeding challenges. Thus, they’re designed in much the same way. Because they often stand in water and wetland vegetation, the snipe’s legs are a bit longer. They also forage more in the open than the forest-loving woodcocks, using a predator-evading zig-zag flight capable of hitting 60 mph. Otherwise, nature has designed them using the same model.
You are what you eat. Every bird is designed to eat specific foods. A hummingbird has a long bill to allow it to poke into flowers. It has exceptionally short legs because it barely needs any legs at all. It perches on branches, rarely sits on the ground, and can’t walk.
By contrast, herons forage for fish by wading in deep water, requiring long legs, a long neck, and long bill. So that’s how nature designed a heron.
Size matters. When identifying a bird, some of the first clues are the overall size of the bird and the size of its parts. Bird species are grouped into families based on similar characteristics.
Some species are noticeably small. Think chickadees, nuthatches and kinglets.
Warblers are small. In Maine, yellow warblers are among the largest warblers. Northern parulas are the smallest. There’s less than an inch difference in wingspan and virtually no difference in weight. Every warbler is small.
Ditto for sparrows. White-throated sparrows are among Maine’s largest sparrows. Chipping sparrows are the smallest. There’s only a half-ounce difference between them. All sparrows are small.
From there, bird species increase in size, topping off with the largest bird in the world — the African ostrich — which weighs 5,536 times more than a yellow warbler.
I mention all this, because the number and variety of birds in Maine increase as migrants return. Maine’s abundance of nesting species is challenging, as is the difficulty of identifying them all. Many new birders make it more difficult by committing one classic mistake. They get captivated by color when they should be more focused on size and shape.
To find a bird in a book, it’s handy to know where to look. The first step is figuring out the mystery bird’s family. Is it a duck? A gull?
Books show pictures of birds, and each picture fills the page. That often doesn’t help to judge relative size at a glance.
An American woodcock, an American bittern and an American black duck are all the same color. Yet they are all completely different shapes. When trying to identify a bird, often the first instinct is to open a field guide, and find one that matches the color. You’ll quickly discover that many birds are brown. Even more are yellow.
Many families have similar shapes as well. They eat the same things so they are designed the same way. Warblers and vireos are similar. Vireos are slightly larger on average, with a hooked tip on the end of the bill. They can open beetles that warblers would struggle to eat. Otherwise, a mystery bird could be either one.
Alas, you’ll also find a lot of variation within families. Woodcocks are grouped with the shorebirds, even though they don’t look anything like a sandpiper and shun the seashore. They do look like a dowitcher — a shorebird that also probes for food, so it’s designed somewhat like a woodcock. Nature is clever.