How we can help nurture our wonderful woodcock

This elusive gamebird makes for exciting winter sport but it is a precious resource to be harvested with restraint

- Mike Swan

Woodcock have a reputation of being unpredictable in their movements, here today and gone tomorrow.

So you could be forgiven for feeling that whether or not you shoot them makes little difference to numbers in the long-term. To the Victorian sportsman, a ‘fall’ was not to be missed. If the keeper found some, he would rush to tell the boss and invitations to shoot tomorrow would be sent out in a hurry.

The first clues that this story of randomness might not quite right come surprisingly early. I remember reading an account of an odd-coloured bird trapped by an early Victorian gamekeeper on the Gower Peninsula in South Wales and taken to his boss.

In an early example of bird ringing, the boss put a band of metal around the bird’s leg and had it released where caught. It was shot in the same spot a year later. Bearing in mind that back then woodcock hardly bred in the UK, this was a first clue to the site fidelity of migrating birds that we have begun to understand in detail over the past two decades.

Population trends

Since those days, we have planted lots of woodland in the UK and it is perhaps unsurprising that the woodcock have responded. Everyone knows about the large-scale afforestation of the 20th century, but it is very likely that the early growth in the home-breeding population, which was documented by the Victorians, was helped by the planting of game coverts as pheasant shooting took off.

So whatever you may have heard about woodcock declining should be set against this. Our home-breeding population probably peaked in the 1970s, though even then they would have been scarce in the western extremities. The great woodcock shooting counties of Cornwall and Pembrokeshire probably never produced any home-bred birds.