The singing grounds that appear scrubby and unremarkable by day hide lurking, long-beaked sorcerers, who emerge only in the edge hours.
Cloaked in subtle robes of warm brown feathers scribed with chevrons, waves and crescent moons, the elusive American woodcock materializes from his fastness to perform his sky dance in the liminal hours of dusk and dawn.
This arcane ritual begins with calling the cardinal directions. North, east, south and west he buzzes his word of power: PEENT.
In a circle he turns, peenting again and again, declaring his presence and availability to any receptive female woodcock. Loudly if invisibly, he claims this brushy clearing as his singing ground, over the distant croakings of chorus frogs and sandhill cranes.
Stalking the woodcock, we creep into the fringes of this magic circle, dodging thorns of prickly ash and crooked fingers of sumac. As his large, dark eyes are set high toward the back of his head, lending him vision in the round, we crouch low in the brush and hold still. Rain begins to tap upon our heads.
Suddenly, the woodcock stops peenting. With a twittering rush of wings, he launches upward into wide, spiraling flight, whirling his ancient invocation into the night. We hear the singing of his flight feathers encircling us, whistling ever faster as he reaches the apex of his towering flight … then, descending, he sounds flurries of quick, chirruping kisses as he swoops side to side like a falling leaf. We glimpse his beaked silhouette gliding past like a dark-winged star plummeting to earth.
He settles in for a moment, then begins once more: PEENT.
Seven times he performs this full ritual, casting his incantatory song-spell far and wide. After he makes his last flight, he lands so near that I hear the intake of his breath before each peent, like a swallowed hiccup of air. Tuck-oo, tuck-oo.
Silence falls at last as, invisible still, the woodcock slips away to his occult chamber of brushy stalks, there to rest before performing his sky dance at daybreak.
Or, perhaps this time, his mating ritual has succeeded? If she chooses, a quiet woodcock hen may, or may not, approach a male after his display … really, there is no telling what happens by night in wild places.
Perhaps she slipped through the darkness to his side after we left, under cover of his patterned wings, soon to make her grassy nest open to the sky and lay sand-colored eggs, freckled with brown.
Perhaps she tells herself a tale of a demon lover, who visits once by night then disappears forever into the tall grasses, leaving her to raise their offspring alone.
Damp, scratched, disheveled and happy, we make our way back along the trail, leaving the birds to their solitude. The crescent moon hangs low in a cauldron of clouds. The sorcerer has ensorcelled. The woodcock came courting, and we were wooed.
Peenting & twittering | Eastman Nature Center, Maple Grove, MN | April 11, 2024
From the shore of a Minneapolis lake, I watch three distant common loons dive for fish beneath the gray wavelets. Even without their eerie wail, the loons’ black heads and large, low-riding bodies are recognizable a long way off. And though they are quiet, I hear the wail in my head anyway. Once you hear that call, you hear it forever.1
Loons are stealth divers. Loons on a lake vanish in a blink — hunting, eating and swimming deep under water for minutes at a time. When at last they surface, they emerge in unexpected spots…usually a long way from shore, and from where you are. They seem to feel the itch of human eyes upon them, and keep as far away as possible.
Later, I read that loons are averse to the presence of humans. Any such wild creature of northern lakes, here, in this human-dominated environment, is an uncommon sight that stirs up a longing: to live in those places where they stay, where the calls of loons shape the hours of day and night … to flee toward those disappearing kingdoms ruled by wild voices.
This is the day of the solar eclipse. In our case, a double eclipse: the clouds eclipsed the moon that eclipsed the sun. On a clear day, we could have seen a partial eclipse, being outside the Path of Totality — that phrase suggesting a mysterious wholeness, perhaps a transformative, baptizing force, that the solar eclipse bestowed upon all beings in its path.
At the moment of semi-totality at the lake, the clouded sky grows darker, as if foreshadowing a heavy rain.
And the loons, they run along the water to gather speed, then take off into the wind … perhaps heading to a larger body of water, where they can tuck their bills into their feathers and sleep, while keeping one red eye open.
In the April darkness one evening, a large flight of migrating trumpeter swans sweep into view. They wheel and undulate like a murmuration of starlings, then wing away with a dazzling oneness of movement and purpose, crossing the continent to a destination only they knew.
Gasps are heard. Time stills, held suspended. This experience lasts less than one minute, in the sky above the roof of museum teeming with people. But wonder, it seems, is less a function of duration or solitude than it is a lightning flash of illumination. As I watch these breathtaking swans, flying as one in all of their power and striving, taking their rightful place in the order of things, I feel the entirety of my being expanding out into the sky, held rapt by the vastness of the moment. At one, for an instant, with the great web of life.
It is in their utter belonging to the earth, water and sky — and their inborn ways of knowing, wielding senses humans will never possess — that swans, loons, woodcocks and all other-than-human beings express their sacred nature and purpose.
David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous, wrote, “...along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.”
These are the stories wonder writes upon us.
Awe is the ineffable language through which the wild speaks to us.
No moment is too brief to be wondrous. No wonder is ever too small.
Earth is a singing ground, where wonder erases the barriers between the fiction of our isolated selves, and the story unfolding all around us, calling us to the truth: that we have been part of this song and this story all along.
May wonder ever find you,
Carmine
Loons make three unique calls: the wail, which they use to find their mate and chicks; the tremolo call, when agitated; and a territorial yodel used only by males.
You've so captured the moment with this, Carmine. I was there.
THIS surely is one of those "stories wonder writes upon us." I absolutely love your writing. so beautiful, you have brought me right into this moment with you, and a beautiful moment it is~ laced, too, with all the heartbreak of these times. My mother loved Loons, as do I. Thank you!