Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes January 7 2009

Again, everything is on hold for 10 minutes. The bird comes out of the wood 40 minutes after the sun sets.

Now it can't be the same bird year after year but the same flight path is used year after year.

Week by week the time is sooner a minute a day until the solstice, then it starts to get later a minute a day. By now it will appear at about ten past five.

It may come earlier if the sky is cloudy. If there is pale blue and a frosty, orange glow it may come a minute or two later. It is gone in an instant but it is wonderful to see.

It makes no sound. No squeak and grunt as it will on its roding flight in spring.

Now it is in a hurry, and like an arrow shoots between the silver birches and over the hazel wands, twisting and turning between the willows and then out across the meadow.

Where is it going? It must be the same place each night, each year, each decade. I have been watching the flight of the woodcock for 30 years from these Sussex woods.

The bird is as black as a witch. Grimm in his fairy tales could not have made a more potent symbol of darkness coming.

In fact, German myths of witches on broomsticks originated from the woodcock with its broom handle beak and besom tail as it rode on some satanic errand on the cusp of night.

The easterly winds of the full moons brought a good fall of woodcock in from Siberia and the low countries this winter. Many went on down to Wales, to Devon and on into Spain and Portugal, where they are called the snow birds.

Woodcocks used to be caught in "springes", according to Shakespeare in Hamlet. I made one of those devices one year just to show an actor who wondered what the Bard had meant.

Obviously I did not set the trap in a likely place but we could see how easily a woodcock could have been hung in the bent hazel wand and its horse-hair noose. In those days there were millions of woodcock in the land. Today, the British Trust for Ornithology reckons about 160,000 pairs breed in the UK, with a big influx in winter. Teatime and woodcock watching are among the best moments of every day in this lonely old wood.