Along the Trail of the Swamp Fox: Hunting Woodcock in South Carolina

In the movie The Patriot starring Mel Gibson, the lead character retreats to the swamps of South Carolina to avoid the pursuing redcoats. These swamps are a veritable no man’s land full of palmetto, cane and greenbrier that will test any man’s mettle. If someone wanted to elude his adversaries, there’s no better place.

- Andrew M. Wayment

The Gibson character is patterned after the real-life Brigadier General Francis Marion, aka “the Swamp Fox,” who hid in the swamps and resorted to guerrilla warfare to help the American army win the campaign in the South. As in the movie, the British sent Colonel Banastre Tarleton to capture or kill Marion, but Tarleton gave up and swore: “As for this damned old fox, the Devil himself could not catch him.”

When my friend Matt Lee invited my brother Shawn and me to South Carolina to hunt wintering woodcock in January, I jumped at the opportunity. A lover of grouse hunting and the vast literature on the subject cannot read about grouse without also hearing about the American woodcock. The Deep South permits the hunter to experience woodcock on their own merits. In South Carolina, hunting woodcock means hunting the backwater swamps, the places where Marion sought refuge.

On the first hunt of the trip, Matt drove us through a loblolly pine forest until we came to the edge of a dark-water swamp interspersed with thick-based cypress trees. Matt put down his pointer Deuce and within minutes, he was fast on point on the edge of a cane thicket. As we worked toward his point, a woodcock flushed with the telltale whistling of its wings. Shawn shot at the ghostly apparition. Deuce quickly retrieved the bird to hand. For a bird that migrates thousands of miles each year and inhabits swampy hellholes, these longbilled birds seemed fragile.