CALAIS — In spring, a young male’s fancy turns to love, and the timberdoodle, the American woodcock, carries the courtly art of wooing a mate to new heights with its high-flying spirals and dramatic ritual dance.

The Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge is the spring and summer home of woodcock and a variety of other songbirds. This year, refuge personnel will hold a series of summer programs to showcase the varieties of wildlife at the refuge. A few weeks ago, the program focused on the “wacky woodcock.”

A few hundred feet from the refuge’s main entrance are the woodcock “singing grounds,” small clear-cuts and fields where the male birds perform their mating ritual with plaintive songs and spiraling flights at twilight and dawn — and sometimes all night when the moon is full.

On a cool spring night a few weeks ago, 20 earnest birders walked the woodcock trail, following the distinctive “peent” sound of the male birds through thick tangled brush that provides protection for the shy, plump, short-legged birds with the mottled black, brown and gray feathers.

“Peent, peent, peent,” he called. Then silence. Within seconds, a small rocket launched into the air. The amorous male soared up several hundred feet, his rounded wings making a twittering sound as the air whipped through the primary feathers. Then, spiraling downward, he chirped, his small brown eyes searching the brush.

Was she watching?

Returning to earth, he landed within a square foot of where he had taken flight. And again, “Peent, peent, peent.” He would perform this ritual more than 30 times a night.

Although the primary woodcock mating season is early spring, females on nests or with broods try to keep males in the area late into the season.

Dan McAuley, a biologist from Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md., who has studied woodcock at the refuge for the past 20 years, believes he knows why the otherwise occupied females still give the males encouragement.

“What they likely are doing is encouraging a male to stay in this spot and keep peenting in case she has to renest,” he said. “She will need a male to get inseminated. It saves her a lot of time if she doesn’t have to go looking for another male. You have to think of it in animal terms. It is cost efficient.”

Female woodcock are selective and rarely respond to the first “peent” they hear. “They spend a lot of time visiting different males. We don’t know what they use to assess why this guy is any better than the other,” McAuley said with a laugh. He said woodcock are polygamous, and a male usually mates with more than one female.

Although most woodcock are hatched in May, females who have renested will have broods hatching into June.

The females build the nests and raise their young on the ground in thickets of young hardwoods, mostly aspen, birch and maple trees in areas where earthworms are plentiful. When their brood is able to fly, they return at night to cleared areas where predators are more easily spotted and avoided. They rarely nest in mature forest areas.

Most nests contain four eggs. Unlike the American bald eagle, which share parenting duties, once the mating ritual is over, the male woodcock departs, and the hen lives her life as a single parent.

Seeing a male woodcock up close is a thrill for avid birders, and spring banding time offers that opportunity.

Using a mist net strung between poles, McAuley trapped one of the male birds. Fitting the woodcock comfortably in his left hand, McAuley placed a band on the bird’s leg. Hereafter, the woodcock will be known as 117322870.

Wings can reveal a woodcock’s age. “This is a secondary bird, a bird that hatched last year. … We can tell by the pattern,” McAuley said as he held up the wing feathers.

“Peent, peent.” A second male could be heard in a distant clearing. The captured woodcock struggled. “He’s mad because he hears that other guy peenting. … That’s his rival. He has been going against him all night,” McAuley said.

Although conditions at the refuge favor woodcock, the outside world has been less kind. The country’s woodcock population has been declining for decades, though the numbers are not low enough to classify woodcock as endangered or threatened as the peregrine falcon and the bald eagle are.

“In the Atlantic flyway, which is the migration path up and down the East Coast, the woodcock population has declined about 40 percent since 1970,” said Lauri Munroe, outdoor recreation planner for the refuge. “Their numbers are going down about 2 percent a year.”

Munroe blamed the decline on changes in forestry practices, a decline in farming, and urbanization.

In the past, wildfires periodically rejuvenated the forest, but wildfires are rare at Moosehorn today, so clever biologists have devised forest-management practices that create woodcock habitat on the refuge.

The term “clear-cutting” conjures up horrible images of woodlands raped by machines that roll over young trees and pull up whole trees by their roots, but the “C”‘ word is important in refuge vernacular.

“Believe it or not, this is a species that benefits from clear-cutting,” Munroe told the birders. “So some of the research here has been to go out and educate landowners so they can manage for woodcock.”

Abandoned farmland reverting to forest is another reason for the decline in woodcock. In the past, Munroe said, farmers plowed the land, planted and harvested. That pattern benefited the woodcock. “Rotation of crops that at times left land fallow helped,” Munroe said.

The push for urbanization, with its concrete and malls, has diminished the bird’s habitat, she said.

A favorite game bird, woodcock face danger from shotgun-toting hunters. Although hunting woodcock on the refuge is prohibited, they are moving targets along their migratory path as they travel south to Virginia and Louisiana for the winter.

In spring, male rituals and female responses are vital to the species’ survival.