One night recently, I walked through a small hill farm in West Cork, and the reflected sunlight of the moon flooded the valley with a silvery, lunar glow that illuminated the bracken-covered stone walls delineating the fields. The land was shrouded in mist from below, creating a scene of unearthly beauty.
The moon was, however, a curse for my companion, James O’Neill, a doctoral researcher at UCC. He had agreed to meet me in the gloaming hours to find the impossibly secretive bird, the woodcock – a creature so elusive that you’d be unlikely to see it even when pitch dark outside. With the moon glowing so brightly, our chances were poor.
Still, James had enough hope to persevere, so we turned our backs on the farmhouse lights and walked into the night. We might, he said, be lucky.
Woodcock from Scandinavia, Siberia and as far away as China, who come here for the cold months, had just started to arrive. Hundreds of thousands of these migrants join our much smaller resident population (James estimates we have about 25,000 breeding males). Migrant woodcock like our mild, wet winters; it’s an antidote to the sub-zero conditions otherwise offered in their boreal homes.
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We took a rough track up the hill, the fields on either side bordered by hedgerows. I had never seen a woodcock in real life before, but images of them are mesmerising.
They have a barrel-chested body resembling a chicken, dumpy legs and a comically long bill. It creates a somewhat alien form, transformed into a thing of immense beauty from its camouflaged, mottle plumage. Their feathers are all russet, peaty and earthy browns and resemble the colours and patterns of an old woodland. This is where they spend their days: silent and still in the woods or under hedgerows, where they melt away into the background, hiding in plain sight from their primary foe, birds of prey.
From above, the tail feathers are grey-black with amber bars, but underneath, they are an exquisite silver at the edges. Earlier this year, a team from Imperial College London discovered that these are the whitest feathers of any bird and may have evolved as a way for woodcock to communicate with each other in the dimly lit hours and as a mechanism to distract predators.
At twilight, hungry but safe under darkness, they stir. A wet field, with plenty of earthworms to eat, is ideal, and they’ll spend the night drumming the earth with their feed to fool the worms to the surface. Migrant woodcock will return annually to the same field’s exact corner and rarely move more than 50 metres from one spot.
James stopped beside an old iron gate and looked across the field through thermal binoculars, making anything visible with a heat signature. The first sound of the night came from a fleeing snipe, which James had spotted in the long grass. A small, thin bird with an elongated bill, it crouched in a hassock of grass but didn’t hang around and, within a beat, shot up, zigzagged through the air and was gone.
James described some of the woodcock’s anatomical uniqueness, and it conjured an image of a bird drawn by a five-year-old with an overactive imagination.
Their liquid-black eyes are set far back into their head, giving them panoramic 360-degree vision. Their robust and elongated bill grows out of their skull at a sharply downward angle. This means woodcock can probe the ground for food while remaining alert to potential predators above.
However, the only space left for their ears is between their eyes and the corner of their mouth. It all makes for an otherworldly look. (In the past, people thought that woodcock lived on the moon for part of the year before descending to the earth, under a full ‘woodcock moon’, for the winter.)
We climbed over another gate and turned upwards along a path, searching for a different field. A barn owl, dazzlingly white, landed without a sound on a tree just a few metres away before gliding off. A long skein of cloud covered the moon, but it was thin and wispy, and within about five minutes, the fields lit up again.
In spring, migrant birds return to their northern climes. Our resident woodcocks, who breed primarily in the midlands, step out from the shadows and make themselves seen and heard.
From April, male woodcock rise up from the woods just before the dawn chorus begins, and fly in loops in the treetops, where they emit a loud call, hoping to attract females. It sounds like the croak of a frog, with a high-pitched note to finish. If a female so much as blinks in his direction, she’ll find herself with company.
We stood on a ridge in the field, and James scoured the area with his torch. Nature’s night shift was a revelation; these pastures are full of cows and sheep during the day, but the place is transformed into a wild hub at night.
And then, James fixed the beam of light across the grass and, barely audible, whispered, “I think we have one”. In a patch of long grass, I saw the red eyeshine of a woodcock. It had arrived from Scandinavia, or beyond, just a few days previously.
When out alone on fieldwork – unburdened by amateurs like me – James can creep up on these crouching, motionless birds, net them and tag them. But this woodcock wasn’t in the mood. It lifted its head and, within milliseconds, burst upwards as if propelled by an explosive device underneath, then weaved and jinked through the cold air. It flashed its luxuriant plumage in my direction and vanished into the night, silhouetted in the West Cork sky.
