The "A New Visitor To Our Neck Of The Woods" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Just got home from the grocery store and my wife told me to, "Come look out the back door at the bird I just took a photograph of a couple of seconds ago."  We searched our rear deck together and finally found it behind our Tiki Bar at the one end of our rear deck.  A bird that I had never seen before.  

The American Woodcock made a visit to our deck.
Click to enlarge.

I grabbed the camera and took a few more photos of it before it decided to take flight.  Before it did it was using its long beak to search between the boards of our deck for what I assume was food.  Carol began a search online to try and figure what exactly had made a visit to our house.  Within minutes she showed me a photo of the American Woodcock; a perfect match for our visitor.  It's plumage is a mix of different shades of browns, grays and black.  It's chest and sides were a variety of white, light gray and light brown colors.  It did not expose its neck, but the description online said that the nape of the neck is black, with three or four crossbars of deep buff.  The toes and feet, which are small and weak, are brownish gray to reddish brown.  The woodcock has large eyes located high in the head and their usual field of view is probably the largest of any bird, 360 degrees in the horizontal plane and 180 degrees in the vertical plane.  As I read more I realized the bird must have gotten off course since it told me that most woodcocks spend the winter in the Gulf Coast and southeastern Atlantic Coast states.  Some may remain as far north as Maryland, eastern Virginia and southern New Jersey.  So, our guest is a few hundred miles too far north in southern Pennsylvania.  The woodcock migrates at night while flying at low altitudes by itself of in small flocks.  It doesn't fly fast with the slowest flight speed ever recorded for a bird, 5 miles per hour.  The woodcock begins to shift southward before ice and snow seal off their food supply which is primarily earthworms.  Their unique bone-and-muscle arrangement lets the bird open and close the tip of its bill while sunk in the ground.  Only problem with this guy on our back porch was that there wasn't any earthworms under the boards of our deck and it's timing was off a bit since we had close to eight inches of snow a few days before.  Luckily the snow had disappeared the day after and the ground is moist so a good hunting ground for worms.  We hope the bird, which seemed to be about the size of a very small duck, will get back on course once again and find its friends in the near future.  But, while visiting our deck, he did have his photo taken and a story written about him.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.