First Saturday Green 101: Trail of the Timberdoodle—Act 2

timberdoodle.org

By motomynd

[Sequel to "Act 1"]

The American woodcock meanders as it migrates, and it travels less in a year than an Arctic tern does in a week, yet it is still one of my favorite birds. There is something about a bird designed for the shore choosing to live in a forest, and its overall charmingly quirky behavior, that endears it to me. There is a bittersweet attraction as well.

    I was a child making my first trip from my birth state of Virginia to Upstate New York when I first met the woodcock. Upstate is the place I should have grown up, if only my parents hadn’t fled south before I was born, as they sought better jobs and to get away from winter. We were visiting Carl and Emma—the couple who would become my favorite aunt and uncle and who were like grandparents to me—when I heard a strange sound coming from the boggy woodland that separated their backyard from Lake Ontario. The call was an insect’s buzz, followed by a bird’s chirp, and then a strange whistling. Creeping along a blueberry hedge I found myself standing in awe at the edge of the darkening forest as the sounds repeated over and over. They were followed by the bizarre, moth-like, fluttering flight of a bird the size of the Bobwhite quail I was used to back in Virginia. It would launch out of its hiding place in the short sedge, fly in a high arcing spiral, then return to a spot only a few feet from me. Then it would do it again. And again.

    “What on earth?” I asked my uncle Carl. “A timberdoodle,” he answered. I stared, thinking it a joke. “A woodcock,” he clarified. We looked it up in his bird book. “What do they mean when they say it is doing a mating flight?” I asked. “Uhmmm…well…it is just something they do to let other birds know they are good…fliers,” he replied. It seemed a stretch, but I let it go.
    A decade later the trail of the timberdoodle took me to the Tug Hill Plateau, to a camp—they call them cabins here in the Southeast—that had been in the family more than 50 years. Carl was by then more grandfather than uncle, in age and attitude, filling the gap created because my real grandfather—his father—died at that camp before I was born, victim of a careless deer hunter.
    We went there in the spring to fly fish for native brook trout, and in the early fall to hunt woodcock over spaniels. The fly fishing was a passion for me—I graduated from spin-casting gear by age 10 and began tying my own flies by age 12—and I loved stalking the colorful trout in the crystal streamlets that came to life on “the hill” then tumbled down slope and became huge rivers when they reached the valleys below. The woodcock hunting was an excuse to spend time with the ghost of my grandfather in the crisp yet wonderful autumn weather that preceded the brutal conditions that often arrived with deer season. Tug Hill averages more than 20 feet of snow each winter, and one hamlet received 39-feet one winter in the 1970s, so the term brutal is not an overstatement.
    Three decades later I saw Carl shoot his last woodcock. Just before sunset, Griz, the yellow Labrador retriever that succeeded Charley, his last beautiful, black spaniel, flushed it out of the same boggy cover behind the house where I saw my first woodcock. It flew strongly away from us, instinctively twisting left and right as it fled through a wild tangle of vines and trees. Just as it seemed impossibly far away and was about to disappear into even deeper cover, Carl’s shotgun barked and the bird crumpled in full flight. It was the greatest wing shot I ever saw, especially for a 90-year-old man shouldering the same gun his father was carrying when he was killed 70 years earlier.
    The footing and cold were too risky for Carl, so Griz and I waded into the icy waters of the swamp. After several minutes we finally found the bird. For some reasons I spread its wings and held it in the last rays of sunlight, studying it closely before we plucked it, dressed it, and cooked it on a wooden spit over the small fire pit in the backyard.

    The little bird was a marker for four decades of my life, covering the evolution from child to what we politely call middle age, and I savored all 40 of those years as we sat there in the cold having a couple of shots of Laphroaig Scotch, with the chill autumn wind biting at us, an early season touch of the Northern Lights playing faintly above, and the coyotes calling as they hunted along the dark shore of the lake. Over the years I had made more than 150 trips to get to know the place and the people I should have grown up with—I made a point to burn every memorable experience deeply into my brain, especially moments like that. It was almost like being back on Tug Hill, even if we were less than 50 yards from the house. Since “the hill” was more than Carl could tackle at his age, it was good enough.
    Driving back to Virginia the next day I couldn’t help but wonder how many more years we would repeat such rituals.
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Act 1 published February 2; Act 3 coming April 6.
Copyright © 2013 by motomynd

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