Ever heard of a Timberdoodle? It's a bird, writes Jim Planck at the Daily Mail, commonly known as the American Woodcock, and it has the best mating dance ever.
It's the Woodcock's mating season, and the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Greene County is inviting you to see it firsthand at the Agroforestry Center in Acra this Thursday. (According to Center's website, snickerdoodles will be served.)
Planck explains what's so special about the Woodcock mating dance this way:
The sudden peents of a woodcock echoing out of the almost-dark in those first moments after sunset carry a strange quality to them -- haunting and mysterious.
When the bird then jumps into the air and descends, especially when unseen, the melody of twitter and whistle travels through the air like an otherworldly pipe or flute.
It is truly a magical sound.
If Stonehenge visually brings thoughts of ancient Picts and Celts, then perhaps the woodcock’s sunset call, which the European species also performs in Scotland and Ireland, strikes a Druidic chord in the ancestral memory of man.
We wanted to see the Woodcock's mating dance for ourselves, so we searched for a video of the phenomenon on YouTube. We found a few examples of the in-flight calls that Planck finds so haunting:
But we also found evidence that the part of the Woodcock's mating dance that happens on the ground is a little less ... dignified:
