Thursday, March 12, 2015

Return of the American woodcock--another March madness

Return of the American woodcock--another March madness

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One of the early season highlights of birding in central Illinois is the widespread return in March of a bird called the American woodcock. Indeed, for some birders this phenomenon holds just as much interest as that other one more commonly known as March madness.

[A woodcock struts his stuff at Meadowbrook Park in Urbana, IL. By Greg Lambeth greglambethbirdphotos.smugmug.com]

The woodcock belongs to the shorebird family, whose more familiar members include sandpipers and plovers. But unlike its cousins, the woodcock prefers habitat composed of moist woods, open fields, and brushy swamps. You won’t see a woodcock poking along beaches or mud flats the way other shorebirds do. Most of the time the woodcock is so secretive and so well camouflaged that unless you witness its courtship display, you’re likely to see one only if you come close to stepping on in it, and it flushes. Then you are startled by an explosion of wings at your feet, after which you’ll have five to ten seconds to watch the bird fly before it lands and takes cover again.

On the ground, the woodcock’s appearance suggests that it was constructed by a birdmaker who didn’t pay strict attention to the shorebird blueprint. It’s a plump bird, about eleven inches long altogether, although its bill accounts for three of those inches. This bill is highly sensitive, which enables woodcocks detect the vibrations made by earthworms underground. And it features a flexible tip that can be opened to grasp worms even while the rest of the bill remains closed.

A woodcock’s eyes bulge out like black, stick-on doll-eyes that are attached in the wrong spot—just a little too high up, and too far back on its head. Odd as it may look, this arrangement allows the woodcock a super wide field of vision—nearly three hundred sixty degrees. This is quite a useful adaptation for a bird that spends so much time with its nose to the ground.

Appearances aside, what endears the woodcock to birders is the strange and elaborate courtship ritual that the males perform at dusk and dawn in the spring. Many people have written to describe this behavior, although none so eloquently as Aldo Leopold, whose book, A Sand County Almanac, has done so much to inspire the modern conservation movement.

This is how Leopold describes the male woodcock’s “sky dance”:

He flies in low from some neighboring thicket, alights on the bare moss, and at once begins the overture: a series of queer throaty peents spaced about two seconds apart, and sounding much like the summer call of the nighthawk.

Suddenly the peenting ceases and the bird flutters skyward in a series of wide spirals, emitting a musical twitter. Up and up he goes, the spirals steeper and smaller, the twittering louder and louder, until the performer is only a speck in the sky. Then, without warning, he tumbles like a crippled plane, giving voice in a soft liquid warble that a March bluebird might envy. At a few feet from the ground he levels off and returns to his peenting ground, usually to the exact spot where the performance began and there resumes peenting.

Depending on conditions, the male woodcock may repeat this performance for a half hour or more.

If you would like to see the sky dance for yourself but don’t know where to look, check out one of the upcoming “Woodcock Walks” conducted by the Champaign County Forest Preserve District. There’s one tomorrow evening at the Homer Lake Forest Preserve, and another next Friday at the Buffalo Trace Prairie in the Lake of the Woods Forest Preserve. Futher details are available through the website of the Champaign County Forest Preserve District.

[A woodcock struts his stuff at Meadowbrook Park in Urbana, IL. By Greg Lambeth greglambethbirdphotos.smugmug.com]


Thursday, March 05, 2015

Get out soon to find the first flower of spring

Get out soon to find the first flower of spring

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People who go looking for beauty in the woodlands of central Illinois tend to get excited about the months of April and May, when showy beauties like Virginia bluebells carpet the woodland floor. But if you wait until April to get out, you may already be a month late for the emergence of the first flower of spring.

I have to admit that the petal-less flower of the plant in question, known by the scientific name Symplocarpus foetidus, is not attractive in conventional terms. It’s a small, spongy, egg-shaped affair that grows up hidden within a specialized leaf that forms a cowl around it, in botanical terms, a “spathe.”

Unlike the flower it contains, however, this spathe is a work of art. Bulbous at the base, which you could encircle with your thumb and index finger, it extends upward in a twisting, tapering spiral three to six inches tall. In color, this spathe may be as nondescript as the winter ground from which it grows, dull brown or gray. But it may also be quite dramatic. The most beautiful among them are wine-red, marked with lighter shades the color of brick and speckles of pink.

Aside from the beauty of its spathe, Symplocarpus foetidus distinguishes itself from all other plants native to Illinois by the fact that it generates heat--enough so that its flower can remain 36 degrees warmer than the surrounding air for a period of about two weeks. This capacity allows it to grow in frozen soil, and also provides an inducement for early emerging insects, by which it is pollinated, to hang around.

[Photo, above, by author. Thermal image, below, created by Paul Nabity, formerly of U of I Institute for Genomic Biology, currently professor in the Department of Entomology, Washington State University. Visit his lab at http://www.nabitylab.org.]

I’ve been coy about calling Symplocarpus foetidus by its common name because that name draws attention to aspects of its personality that people may find unappealing. That’s “skunk cabbage,” and this is definitely a plant that lives down to its name.

As the flower of skunk cabbage matures, it gives off a distinct, skunk-like odor, an odor that can also be produced by crushing any part of the plant. It’s unattractive to people, but a real turn-on for carrion-eating insects, and, hey, a plant needs to please its pollinators.

Something cool about skunk cabbage that you can’t know by observing its aboveground components is that it grows deeper into the earth every year, pulled downward by a massive root system that alternately extends and then gradually contracts. On account of that, it is said to be impossible to dig an old one out of the ground.

Skunk cabbage flourishes in woodland habitats where the soil remains mucky throughout the year, which are few locally. The most accessible places to seek it are at seeps in the Middle Fork State Fish and Wildlife Area, north of Kickapoo State Park, and in the Vermilion County Conservation District’s Forest Glen Preserve.


If you are not inclined to seek out skunk cabbage in the next few weeks, you might look for it later in the season as its giant leaves—some more than two feet long—unfurl. But don’t wait too long. As summer begins to wear, they die back in their own unpleasant way, dissolving into a smelly black slime rather than drying out.