woodcocks

 A few days ago I got an email from a friend that lives at the Vermont Zen Center. She is also a reader of this blog. She had read about woodcocks and was all excited about them. The article she read mentioned some writing that Aldo Leopold had done about woodcocks in his masterpiece on wildness, A Sand County Almanac. She had seen where I had mentioned this work on this blog, and wondered if I knew anything about woodcocks.

wikipedia

 I am familiar with Leopold's piece and with woodcocks. They are an amazing bird. They have a mating dance every spring in the north country that is amazing to behold. I told my friend that I had actually seen woodcocks do their thing at the Center. She should look for them down by the bridge. I told her what to listen for, and how you can actually get very close to them if you move towards their location when they are performing the aerial part of their mating dance.

Aylie's email and enthusiasm about woodcock's reignited my own interest in seeing them again. I went out to the West Road around sunset and looked for them where I had seen them in years past. There are a couple of new houses in that area and I, and I was worried that the change in habitat had driven them away. That seems to happen so often these days. I walked around for awhile and didn't hear anything. I turned around and headed back to my car. Then I heard it, the peent, peent sound of a woodcock! At that point it was too dark for me to see them, but it was enough for me to know that they were still out there.

I drove home with the happy thought of recounting my adventure with an email to Aylie. When I got on the computer, there was an email from her. She said that they had seen one. She said that she was happy to report that they were still there down by the bridge in the spot that I had seen them years before.

I couldn't help but think of the first time I had seen a woodcock. Amazingly enough, it occurred at the very same Center in Shelburne when I had attended a Lovingkindness workshop with my friend Doug. We were heading for the car when all of a sudden he seemed to go crazy. "There's a woodcock!" he said. He showed me the stalking process that I mentioned here earlier. Doug is a retired state biologist. Actually, he helped to restore the wild turkey population to Vermont very early in his career. Later in his life he became well known within the area because of his work with rattlesnakes. He is normally a pretty soft spoken guy, but was a different person altogether during this episode, totally animated. It was pretty easy to see why he had become a biologist.

As is sometimes the case, I was filled with emotion as I read Aylie's email, but I was having difficulty naming it. I was grateful and the gratitude seemed to point in many directions. Grateful for Aylie, Doug, Aldo Leopold, and to live in a place where the miracles of the natural world can still be experienced; where they haven't disappeared completely. Just happy to be alive.