The hunt was well into its fourth hour when Sam's bell fell finally silent. "It's about time," I said under my breath to the woodcock I imagined crouched beneath the dog's nose, "Where have you been all day?"
Squinting through the second growth until I located the rigid shorthair, I whistled to Dave and pointed out the spot, pleased to finally deliver at least one of the woodcock I'd promised. As we walked in on either side of the dog, I readied myself for the rising knuckle ball flush of a woodcock. Instead a ruffed grouse whirred off straightaway, hard and low, a reddish knee-high fastball in thick cover.
Too surprised to think and miss, I snapped the gun up and brought the grouse down in a shower of branches while Dave was still wondering whether the bird would ever come into the open where he could take a decent swing at it.
Understand here that bagging a ruffed grouse is at best an annual event for me. Shooting my yearly bird in front of someone who had never even seen a grouse before and would have been no less impressed had I simply taken off my hat and pulled the bird out, was a moment to savor. And so the disappointment I felt over the total absence of woodcock was eased for a moment.
As we hunted on, however, the nagging feeling returned. Where were they? We hit all my old reliable spots that afternoon and found nothing, not even the dried splashes that meant the flight birds had already come and gone.
I was not the only hunter to find his familiar coverts empty last year. Contrary weather patterns during the season made birds especially hard to find, but the fact is, woodcock numbers have fallen steadily throughout the last 22 years.
What's happening to the woodcock? The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lays the blame on the loss and degradation habitat. Each year precious cover is lost forever, cleared and paved over or plowed under. Less readily apparent but of greater consequence is the widespread degradation of habitat which occurs as timbers mature. Woodcock are birds of early succession. Where abandoned farms and orchards in the north once provided ideal habitat, many of them have now grown up into mature, open woods.
Meanwhile, wholesale changes have taken place in the southern states where woodcock winter. Acres of river bottom timbers have been cleared for agriculture in the south. I've seen it myself while hunting woodcock near Baton Rouge. Outside the levee walls that hold the Mississippi in check, the flood plain was miles wide, but the bottom land timbers were gone, replaced by sugar cane and soybeans.
We hunted in the shadow of a ruined sugar refinery, slogging through ankle deep water, keeping a watchful eye out for water moccasins (I was, anyway). Some of the cane brakes were so dense you'd think a woodcock would have to stand on one wing to pass between the stems, yet the birds were there, flushing and ricocheting off the sugarcane as they flitted to safety. While it would appear that the birds have made themselves at home in the cane fields, we really don't know very much about the quantity or the quality of the woodcock cover in the New South.
There is also the matter of how woodcock will continue to get from breeding to wintering grounds and back every year. A woodcock in flight flits rather than flies, looking more like a giant moth than a bird capable of making the long trip from Nova Scotia to Georgia. During the journey, certain staging areas become absolutely vital: Cape May, New Jersey, and Cape Charles, Virginia, where, when the wind blows from the south, birds pile up like drifts against a snow fence, waiting for a tailwind to carry them south across the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. Inland, woodcock gather in the Canaan Valley in West Virginia, a key island of habitat in the Appalachians. All three are under pressure from development. Other critical stopovers have not even yet been identified; researchers believe that some islands on the Mississippi may in fact be crucial resting spots for Central Region birds.
Finally, there is the whole question of earthworms. With its uniquely designed bill able to open underground, its eyes that face backwards, allowing it to watch for predators while probing the mud, woodcock are uniquely adapted to eating worms--so much so that there isn't much else they care to eat. Oh, they will, in a pinch, eat a bit of sedge or bristlegrass, perhaps, or the occasional fly, beetle, caterpillar, or centipede. But roughly two thirds of the bird's diet is made up of earthworms and what is bad for the earthworm is very bad for the woodcock. Worms have a low tolerance for acid in the soil, (hence the woodcock hunter's belief that mossy areas rarely hold woodcock, since moss grows best in acidic soils) and we know acid rain has been falling on the Northeast for several years now, yet we have little idea thus far of how the worms are holding up.
In 1990, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced an effort to deal with the woodcock's plight. Called the American Woodcock Management Plan, it is a blueprint to coordinate public and private, federal and state efforts to study and reverse the woodcock decline, attempting to knit together a solution to the bird's myriad problems. Habitat enhancement, landowner education, refuge acquisition, and intensive study all make up parts of the Plan.
Since habitat degradation has been identified as the main culprit, Ashley Straw, Woodcock Specialist at the FWS until his untimely death last year, was cautiously optimistic. "It's a matter of education," he said, "There's a lot of interest in helping woodcock but people don't know what to do. We need to promote sustained-yield forestry practices that produce a constant ratio of age classes [of trees]. Otherwise we'll be caught in a continuous boom and bust cycle."
Greg Sepik, FWS biologist at the Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge, where woodcock are the subject of intensive study, cautions that there are a number of well-intentioned but misguided bills in Congress that would end clear-cutting on public lands. Without the ability to clear-cut, managers would be helpless to create the new growth woodcock need. Even so, Ashley Straw believed that we can turn a corner in the next 10 or 15 years if proper management techniques become better known and more widely utilized.
For those of us who love to hunt woodcock 10 or 15 years seems like a very long time. Should we hang up our shotguns until the birds recover? The Fish and Wildlife Service believes that mortality through hunting plays no part in the woodcock's decline.
According to Straw, the changes in population are consistent with readily observable changes in habitat. Woodcock bands are returned at a rate comparable to that of rails and other lightly hunted birds. Many woodcock, Straw's predecessor Brad Bortner once told me, probably make their entire southern flight without seeing a hunter.
And yet some hunters are showing their concern for the woodcock by practicing voluntary restraint, shooting less than the daily bag limit.
The idea has considerable appeal. I already find woodcock hard to kill. Shorebirds who've adapted to life in the uplands, woodcock have a fish-out-of-water quality I can't help but respond to. Every corkscrewing flight through heavy cover is an adventure. Watch a woodcock carom from branch to branch as it tries to escape, and you have to wonder if the birds weren't better suited to life on the beach.
Letting a few go, regardless of what effect it may have on the overall population, seems like the right thing to do. That, I think, is why the idea is catching on with woodcock hunters. In woodcock hunting, form matters, and the hunt must be conducted just so in order to feel right about the actual killing, which explains why so many woodcock hunters are fastidious about guns, dogs, dress, and manners in the field.
Some especially refined sports, I understand, affect neckties along with their side-by-sides for woodcock hunting. I might not go so far as to hunt in a tie, but I'll say for woodcock that they're the only bird that make me feel underdressed in the field.
Complicating my diffidence about killing woodcock is the way they taste. Some adore the taste, others eventually acquire it, and many can't stand it at all.
A couple of seasons ago I ran into two hunters parked next to my favorite covert. They were after grouse, I was hunting woodcock. When I returned to the car, they were gone, but they'd left two woodcock for me on the hood with a note: "Take these woodcock. We don't like the taste of liver."
Well, not liver exactly, but strong beyond all expectation, and, to some, beyond compare. Count my wife in the group that prizes woodcock over all other wild game. As I leave the house to hunt pheasants or deer, Pam hovers about the front door saying, "Don't let anyone shoot you," and, "Wear plenty of orange." On days I plan to hunt woodcock, however, she skips the safety reminders and tells me not to give any birds away.
My annual bag of woodcock amounts to about two dinners and a snack (less now that my three-year-old son has developed a fondness for the drumsticks) so I have to admit that the true pleasure of woodcock hunting does not lie solely in filling the larder. It's anticipation that gives woodcock hunting its charm. The arrival of any migratory bird is an event to watch for, calculate, and predict. Like waterfowlers, woodcock hunters know that Opening Day may not bring the best hunting, but it begins the period in which to mark time, waiting for the day the weather map shows those big, beautiful blue arrows of Canadian cold air pushing down from the north. In the wake of the system comes high pressure and clear skies, giving the night-flying woodcock good visibility for navigation and a tailwind to help them along.
Finding yourself in the right place at the right time is its own reward when autumn's tide sweeps over the coverts. You feel totally in synch with the change of seasons, just one more predator taking part in the last quickening of activity before the onset of cold weather.
And then, just as quickly, the woodcock are gone, leaving us to face the cold alone and look forward to their return come spring. These days, each time the woodcock go you wonder if this will be the year they don't come back.
The other night I caught a troublesome glimpse of the future. I visited a field near my home where friends had reported displaying woodcock. All I saw was a bat, dipping and bobbing through the dusk. Around me, I could hear the hoots and howls of the night shift waking up in the woods, answered by a turkey already on the roost. I was straining my ears for the peenting of the woodcock, and, not hearing it, found the noisy woods suddenly seemed very quiet indeed.
Many of the Fish and Wildlife Service's statistics on brood nesting success and hunting mortality are derived from the woodcock wing survey, in which participating hunters put one wing from each bird they shoot into an envelope and send it to the FWS. At the Service's annual March "wingbee" the wings are sorted according to age and sex, providing a picture of the previous year's hatch and harvest.
When Outdoor Life Iowa Editor Larry Brown and I compared notes last fall, we realized that between the two of us we'd sent in all 19 wings reported from Iowa the year before. That incident points up the one problem with the survey: not enough people participate. The FWS does not know exactly who is hunting woodcock, so they are unable to contact potential volunteers.
However, the new "Migratory Bird Harvest Information Program" will provide a broad base of names from which a truly random and comprehensive sample may be drawn. By 1998, all 50 states will be included, but currently, only three--Missouri, South Dakota and California--are participating. Hunters planning to hunt migratory birds in those states will fill out a survey information card when they purchase their licenses. Not all hunters filling out cards will be asked to participate in the wing survey, but their names will form part of the data base of potential cooperators.
In the meantime, hunters interested in volunteering for the survey should contact the Fish and Wildlife Service (Ashley Straw, Woodcock Specialist, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Laurel, MD 20708). Straw told me that he especially needs hunters from the southern parts of the woodcock's range to cooperate in the survey.
Founded in 1961, the Ruffed Grouse Society is dedicated to working on behalf of all early succession forest wildlife, which includes its namesake, the ruffed grouse, as well as the woodcock and a tremendous variety of game and non-game species besides.
The Society assists with habitat projects on public and private lands. Its Management Area Projects (MAPs) program aims to improve habitat on national, state, and county owned holdings. The Society provides both expertise and some funds, and as of this writing, MAPs projects total almost 300,000 acres.
The "Coverts" project program is designed to educate landowners on how to manage their own property for grouse and woodcock. Active in Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, Ohio, Maine, Virginia, and New York and scheduled to begin soon in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, the Coverts program provides intensive training in habitat management to interested landowners, who then work as volunteers in their communities, helping their neighbors carry out similar projects.
The RGS also involves itself in research. Currently, the Society, the FWS, Louisiana State University, and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries have begun a cooperative project to band and monitor woodcock by radio telemetry in Louisiana.
To find out more about the Ruffed Grouse Society, contact them at: The Ruffed Grouse Society, 451 McCormick Rd. Coraopolis, PA 15108.
Much of prime woodcock habitat, especially in the Northeast, lies on private property. The Fish and Wildlife Service believes that educating private landowners may be the key to restoring woodcock populations. FWS has produced a book, A Landowner's Guide to Woodcock Habitat Management in the Northeast, which will guide landowners towards practices that will benefit woodcock on their property.
To oversimplify somewhat, the book recommends selective clear cutting to create more edge, open singing areas and the stands of young 5- to 10-year-old aspens woodcock need, rather than simply allowing small woodlots to grow into mature timbers all at once. So far, over 3,000 copies of the guide have been distributed. If you would like a free copy, write to Ashley Straw, Woodcock Specialist, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Laurel, MD 20708.
The Ruffed Grouse Society is also an excellent source of technical assistance to interested landowners.
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