And Active Land Management for Them
by Larry Partridge | RGS & AWS Lower Michigan and Eastern U.P. Forest Conservation Coordinator
The American woodcock is one of our most beloved upland bird species. Prized by all types of outdoor and wildlife groups, they delight hunters (for their energetic flush) and birdwatchers (for their impressive aerial displays) alike. And, whichever camp you find yourself in, understanding the woodcock habits and habitat will greatly improve your user experience and maybe even help you to attract a fall of timberdoodles to your own piece of land.
Woodcock are particular creatures and, while they can be found throughout the woodlands of the eastern U.S., are quite reliant on a few specific habitat qualities in order to have all of their needs met. While one or more of these qualities can sustain some birds and certainly contribute to providing habitat during migration, a property that provides all four can support woodcock throughout the season and will promote breeding and help grow their population.
For feeding, woodcock require moist, rich soils. While they’ve long since moved away from the open waters and wetlands of their sandpiper cousins, they are still closely tied to a moist environment. This provides the best habitat for the woodcock’s preferred food sources: burrowing invertebrates, larvae and, especially, earthworms. Adjacency to the classic bottomlands or swamp can certainly meet this need; however, within our broadleaf forests, we can find plenty of additional opportunity. Common forest microhabitats, such as vernal pools, perched water tables, draws and dry-runs, can all provide suitable feeding habitat for both resident and migratory woodcock.
For roosting and layover cover, woodcock prefer weedy, open sites with a component of low-to-medium density shrubs or young trees. This could be an old, fallow farm field grown up with a mix of shrubs or a recent timber harvest with its flush of herbaceous growth and mix of newly established saplings. As a ground-roosting bird, the woodcock is looking for a place where it can blend in with the plant life along the forest floor, but still be open enough to spot predators and escape if disturbed.
During the spring brood rearing season, woodcock will seek out copses of small diameter, broadleaf tree species in which to nest. Alder thickets are a favored nesting cover for woodcock as they tend to naturally grow in dense tangles and only grow so large – even in advanced age. Nesting needs can also be met with the early regrowth of other hardwood tree species. Aspen, birch and even maple or ash can provide quality nesting habitat following a timber harvest when the saplings of these species sprout back in thick patches. These young forests can provide decent brood rearing habitat for multiple seasons, but tend to lose their utility for this after roughly 10 years or once the trees get much larger than 1 to 2 inches in diameter.
And one of the most well-known components of woodcock habitat is the open field or clearing. This is where woodcock will gather during the spring breeding season for the males to put on their impressive aerial mating displays. These openings need to be at least one acre in size and kept relatively clear of woody growth to provide the space required for their sky dance.
These four elements – moist soil, open shrubland, dense woody copses and forest clearings – all combine to make ideal, season-long woodcock habitat. With these factors in mind, managing your property for woodcock can be relatively straightforward. A property with a mix of upland forests and wet lowlands is ideal, but most forested property can be curated to meet the majority of these habitat needs.
Planning and management design are important when tailoring your property for woodcock habitat. Each of these habitat components are valuable in their own right, but their value will increase if developed in some proximity to each other. If you plan to designate and develop an area for quality woodcock brooding and roosting, a good rule of thumb (and there is some room to play here) is to put 80% of it into forest/alder management, another 15% into open shrubland and the remaining 5% into clearings or fields, keeping in mind that high soil moisture feeding areas can be distributed throughout, but should be reasonably accessible from any of your cover types. If you’re looking to promote woodcock residency, you want those woodcock to be able to move from feeding grounds to cover in only one or two flush flight distances.
There are a lot of options available when managing your forests for appropriate woodcock habitat. Aspen is an ideal forest type with which to work and can be managed in as small as five-acre chunks to perpetually maintain that young forest component. Other forest types can certainly be harnessed and managed in a variety of fashions (consider femelschag, shelterwood or any other regenerative forestry approach) considering young forest is a primary focus. If you happen to have alder to work with as your primary brooding cover, you’ll benefit from the long-term capacity of this cover type to provide quality nesting space. Depending on how much alder you have to work with, there may be some benefits to systematic alder shearing, targeting strips of 80 to 100 feet wide to create multiple age-classes of usable habitat.
In the process of undertaking active forest management, creating openings and clearings becomes much easier and, occasionally, just a passive bonus to doing good forestry. Very often, your logging deck or space cleared for logging operations can be easily seeded with clover and maintained as openings for breeding activity. Clearcutting portions of the property and occasionally retreating with a brush hog or Fecon mower can create a suitable shrubland for roosting and layover habitat (being careful to avoid management during late summer and fall when this habitat is being used). If you already have fallow fields to work with, allowing some of them to shrub up would certainly suffice. The planting of flowering shrubs and plants can also help promote invertebrate populations and supplement local feeding. As with any land management, the options available to you will depend on the particular qualities of each property. Every different piece of land will provide its own opportunities and challenges. Much of the fun of management design is in figuring out what you already have, what’s unique about your property and building out a vision of what you’d like to see it become – that desired future condition.
