by T. Edward Nickens
It’s never been less than a mystery. Not even after three dozen years in pursuit of this bird. Not even when the bird dog is stone-still, stems of river cane quivering to give away its presence in the bottomland thicket and, for a long moment, after I’ve stalked to the dog and found a meager opening in the greenbrier and river birch through which to swing a shotgun, and I know that somewhere close by a woodcock prepares to launch. Even when I know all of this – and I know it less often than I’d like – the bird is a mystery to me. A totem, a sort of locum tenems for so much of what I love about the places where I find these birds: in the overlooked places. The tucked away. The mucky and brambly and primordial. The underappreciated.
I’ve chased woodcock from Louisiana to Maine, purposefully, but in my neck of the swamp, the flat blackwater lowgrounds of eastern North Carolina, woodcock are hunted as often by accident as by design. You flush them when you’re quail hunting or find them when walking into a duck swamp. The birds appear as if they’ve been spat from the sky and, suddenly, whatever it was you were doing – you are doing no longer. Woodcock are here-today-and-gone-today, so you shelve the decoys or turn the dogs towards the thick bottoms. We don’t let woodcock chances slip us by.
My first woodcock was an accidental bird. My buddy, Vic Venters, and I were following a pair of setters through a tangled briar thicket in North Carolina’s Onslow County, ostensibly hunting quail, but mostly donating blood. A stiff wind rushed through the treetops and we’d pushed through the thickets bordering cornfields in hopes of finding a covey hunkered down in the thick stuff. (Venters, it should be noted, has gone on to artistic heights as senior editor of Shooting Sportsman and author of “Gun Craft: Fine Guns & Gunmakers in the 21st Century” while I have remained mired in the glop of bottom-feeding freelance status.) I was just about resigned to a birdless morning when my dog Top pointed, barely visible in the shoulder-high cane.
With a sudden flurry, a single bird broke from the brush. I heard Vic shout “Timberdoodle!” or, at least, I figured it was Vic’s voice. Given the tangled hell of river cane and privet that pinned my arms to my side and rendered my shotgun nearly useless, I could only figure that the whoop from the far side of the creek belonged to my gunning pal. Then I saw the bird, an odd brown blob with a downward pointing bill, leveling out just above the thicket and ready to pour on the speed. I was expecting a covey of swamp-bottom bobwhites to burst from under the dog, but I knew a russet-feathered gift when it comes my way. I had to swing the gun like an axe to push the barrels through the thicket – hardly textbook form – but it did the trick. The brown blob tumbled to the ground and, just like that, our bobwhite quail hunt turned into an unexpectedly happy woodcock hunt.
And, it’s never come to a complete stop, really.
There simply is nothing else like this curious bird: A brown, stocky customer with a too-long bill and black, limpid eyes set high and bulging on the forehead. Woodcock feed almost exclusively on earthworms. At the tip of the long bill is a bundle of specialized nerves that can detect the presence of earthworm mucus for up to 24 hours after a worm has wormed through the area. The birds probe the muck with a tweezer-like tip whose endmost third can move independently – like mobile tweezers – enabling a woodcock to grasp a worm even when it has its bill buried in the mud.
It’s hard to ignore such a prodigious proboscis, for sure. But equally intriguing is how the brain evolved to support the woodcock’s incessant habit of sticking its face in the dirt. Woodcock feed largely at night, so their eyes are relatively huge. From an evolutionary timescale, as the woodcock’s eye gained in size and moved towards the top of its head, the growth was at the expense of the forebrain, which ultimately had to rotate backward while much of the brain had to push downward and slightly forward. In essence, the woodcock has an upside-down bird brain. There’s no way of knowing if the Seneca tribe of the Northeast were up to snuff on the phylogenetic changes that helped fashion the woodcock’s noggin and snout, but they certainly realized that this little bird was, let’s just say, different. Those natives held that woodcock were formed by a higher power from all the leftover parts of other birds. Bill of snipe, rounded wing of owl, torso of grouse – a feathered alchemy of cobbled together thises and thats. The woodcock – AKA bogsucker, swamp bat, night partridge and, of course, timberdoodle.
A couple years ago, I hunted woodcock with Stephen Faust, a North Carolina guide and trainer of exquisite Gordon setters, he shape-shifts each fall as he migrates from the southern bogs to the big woods of the Midwest. Along the corrugated ridges of the Uwharrie Mountains in North Carolina, I dropped the first bird of a multi-day trip. With Faust looking over my shoulder, I smoothed the ruffled feathers on its head, the eyes bottomless as drops of black ink where four telltale dark stripes across the bird’s head and neck appear as parallel smudges of ink. They looked like some kind of purposeful marking, an imprimatur of some higher power that could have sent this exquisite creature hurtling across the continent and I remember how Faust described those markings.
“The fingers of God,” he’d said, almost as an invocation for the days and the season to come. “What a bird. What a fantastic little bird.”
The woodcock could use a little hand-holding from a higher power about now. Their numbers are tumbling on a downward trajectory steeper than any hunter would like to see. From 1969 to 2022, both the eastern and central populations of woodcock experienced “significant, long-term negative trend(s),” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Numbers tumbled an average of 0.84% per year in the eastern region and 0.62% per year in the central region. The culprit is easily figured: Woodcock require shrubby, early growth – the kind that comes in after timber harvest or as abandoned fields grow up in to woods. It’s a habitat type in very short supply – especially in the woodcock’s northern range – as the nation’s forests age and timber harvest in large deciduous forests declines.
But the solutions are harder to wrangle. Thankfully, much of the potential rests with private landowners who own and manage most of the nation’s forests. Even minor adjustments in managing woods and fields for woodcock can really help hold these birds. Whether you have a five-acre stream bottom horse pasture or a 5,000-acre deer lease, you can give woodcock a leg up by actively managing your lands for their winter needs.
First, find the daytime cover that woodcock need to stay safe when the sun is up. These are moist swaths of rich soils at least 50 yards wide at the bottom of slopes or along creeks and streams. A critical component of these resting areas is lots of vertical structures that allow birds to walk around on the ground, but still be protected by vegetation above. Plant alders and cane in moist soil environments and consider half-cutting trees by severing partway through the trunks and allowing the tree to fall, but still retaining enough intact trunk to keep it alive. A new thicket will grow in the flush of sunlight, giving the birds the vertical structure they crave. And think about plugging old drainage ditches to allow the water table to rise to a more natural level. That will help bring back earthworms and attract woodcock.
Carefully planned timber harvest can also open the door to woodcock. Leave moist seeps and spring areas alone, but consider patches of small clearcuts, which provide super roosting cover for woodcock and other upland birds. Small woodlot thinnings allow more sunlight to reach the ground and that provides the young growth woodcock prefer. Pine forests can be good or bad for woodcock – it’s all a matter of how they’re managed. Pine litter is acidic and can blunt worm populations, so the thicker an understory of hardwood shrubs and cane thickets you can provide in a pine plantation, the better. Small patches of winter burns can open up pine plantations, providing for good feeding cover as well. And consider burning pastures in October and November to create clean nocturnal foraging habitat. Wintering birds probe wet, close-cropped pastures for earthworms.
TheFrench considered la bècasse – a riff off its big beak – among the finest gamebirds for the table. A meal of woodcock “begynneth the feest from Pentecost unto mydsomer” in the 1508 “The Boke of Keruynge (The Book of Carving),” considered one of the earliest tomes of table service. Four centuries later, Auguste Escoffier’s 1903 masterpiece “Le Guide Culinaire” includes 26 recipes for the woodcock and the first one in my English-version copy calls for the legs and breasts to be roasted and the carcass and intestines chopped and then cooked with flamed brandy before being pressed through a sieve to coat the woodcock pieces with the goût de terroir of bird, mud, cool night air and the snarl of briar. The dish was served topped with the bird’s plucked head.
Which is one way to go. But the French didn’t have access to grits, Texas bourbon and my mom’s fig preserves. One night last year, while my buddy Mike Neiduski spit-roasted a brace of woodcock over a campfire, I stirred their hearts and livers in foamed butter and bacon grease left over from breakfast, added two precise dollops of heavy cream to the black iron pan and worked globs of fig preserves into the thickening mix, a sort of backwoods beurre blanc that paired well with grits.
The fire roared, and we clinked glasses of straight whiskey smeared with firewood char and pinfeathers, and the conversation rose like gyring sparks into the dark skies. It was a clear starry evening and for a while no one wanted to say what they there thinking.
“Migration night,” Neiduski finally mused. Birds often choose a night like this to fly, to rise over the earth in the less-turbulent atmosphere of the cool evening, with a clear view of the stars to set their course elsewhere. It was just the kind of night during which woodcock might pick up and leave.
Or even more might arrive.
I think that’s why I love the pursuit of woodcock so much. The chance to encounter these birds seems both ephemeral and eternal – each winter they’re coming and could be here already. Or they’re coming and they have yet to arrive. For hunters, they’re in reach, but often just out of reach. Underfoot and close at hand and in the next moment twittering away just beyond range. But the possibility of woodcock in the wet winter woods is always there. And like many things of great value, they come only to those who pursue what their eyes cannot yet see.
To those who believe.
And when such faith is manifested in boot leather and dog paws, in crisp mornings and wet woods where none but the birds and the bird-seekers go, who wouldn’t choose to believe?
