Don't Hurt Woodcocks?

Now through May, stewards and off-trail-walkers might want to be alert for woodcocks. 

You may find one to three eggs, just sitting untended, in a hardly noticeable nest, on the ground, often in prairie near thickets, or in the thickets themselves, or in woods near openings. If you stay on trails, you're safe. If you walk cross-country, for example for stewardship work, be alert.

Check stewardship work areas for nests before beginning. If you find a nest, mark the area with flagging or perhaps a distinctive stick, stuck in the ground a few feet away. Or identify a nearby easily recognizable landmark. Then stay away. Avoid passing through or working in that area for three weeks. If for some important reason you must work nearby, place flags or flagging around the nest area and teach people to stay away. 

Don’t leave your scent by touching vegetation near the nest or return to it repeatedly, as that may give it away to predators.

If someone steps on eggs at this stage, it is a loss, but it’s the least costly time for damage to woodcock nests. The hen will just lay more eggs in a new nest. The concerns described below are more serious.

Once the full clutch of four eggs has been laid, the hen will spend all her time (except for a little quick foraging) incubating the eggs. This takes a lot out of her, and it is increasingly costly to her as time goes on, for the nest to be destroyed.

Throughout incubation, the hen will sit close on the nest, even if you approach within a foot or two. She often won’t fly unless you’re about to step right on her. In contrast, non-incubating woodcocks are likely to fly away rapidly when you approach within a few yards. If one startles you by flying up when you are just a foot or two away, freeze.  Don’t more your feet. Look carefully for eggs or chicks. 

 

Hens sit tight on nests. They may begin incubating eggs in the grayness of late March.

By the time the eggs hatch, three weeks later, green leaves further obscure the sitting hen.

After she flies up, look for those eggs. In the photo below the four eggs are front, center (just behind that piece of log).

Unfortunately, this hen had been scared off this nest. Some hens will abandon such a discovered nest. Others will return and continue incubating. 

In the area shown above, the brush was cut by machine. The woodhen cleverly chose this hard-to-walk-through site for a nest after the brush had been cut. (More discussion of this odd photo at end.)

After 20 to 21 days of incubation, the eggs hatch, and the chicks are then especially vulnerable until they “fledge” (that is, become able to fly) in 14 days. Woodchicks are precocial; that is, they can run around and feed themselves as soon as they hatch. But if you are nearby, they will not run. The woodhen stays close to the chicks and tends them as they all move around and feed together. If you approach to a few feet of the chicks, the woodhen flies up in an odd way, designed to lure you away from the chicks. If this happens, freeze. Don’t move your feet. If others are with you, earnestly direct them to do the same. There are likely to be chicks near people's feet. 

The hen alerts you to the presence of chicks by a distracting flight pattern. She explodes into the air, then hovers before you, flying low and slow, with her tail spread and pointing down. Older books claim that she rescues her chicks by flying off with them clutched between her legs. This is not true, but her act gives that impression.

If this happens to you, freeze. Before you move a foot, look patiently for little cream and brown puffs with straight, dark bills. Identify where all four chicks are. (Usually, all four chicks will be present and close to each other. On occasion, some predator has already reduced them to three or two.) Once you know where the chicks are, back away from them carefully. 

In the photo above, if you look patiently, you can find one chick. It’s not easy, and it’s harder in the field, but you can do it. 

How likely is this? If you confine your walking to trails, you won’t have a problem. On the other hand, at Somme Prairie Grove and Somme Woods, where we do a great deal of ecosystem-saving in spring (controlling invasive brush and weeds), we find half a dozen nests or groups of chicks every year. Doing right requires vigilance. We take pride in being careful, and to date we have not knowingly damaged nests or chicks. (But see discussion of woodcocks and fire, below.) More importantly, the woodcock populations have been growing at both sites. 

Where’s Waldo?

If you’d like to train your eye with more camouflaged woodchicks, search below.

 Can you find three woodchicks hiding above?

If not, is this close-up easier? Here we see those same three chicks, bigger and easier? Look closely at the one near the top left, and you can see its little dark eye, looking at you. Check the one top right, and you can see the outline of its little head with its dark bill sticking out toward the left. With the chick bottom-left-middle, all I can recognize is the dark top of its head (facing left) and the brown-and-cream stripes on its body. So hard to see, but you wouldn't want to step on any of them. 

Those same chicks are also in this photo. The story here is that we were burning a prairie, kind of late in spring, April 22, 2014. We saw the hen rise up with her distraction display - just before the flames reached this area. We quickly sprayed water there, leaving the chicks wet but safe. We left them alone. The hen certainly led her chicks to a nearby un-burned thicket as soon as she got a chance.   

Why, some people will ask, were we burning a prairie so late in the spring?!?! The main reason is that it was an important site that hadn't been burned for some years, and this had been the first chance we got, for an isolated site that required specialized wind conditions. On the plus side, Eurasian cool-season grasses were a problem here, and late fires are especially good at controlling them. Prairie plant species are adapted to all kinds of fires and come back stronger. That's true of most animal species too. Great prairie manager and entomologist, Dr. Ron Panzer, is famous (with some of us at least) for saying, "Burning is terribly hard on many prairie invertebrates. The only thing that's more damaging is not burning." If you lose the habitat, you lose all the animals, not just some of them.

Thus, in ecosystem management, you sometimes have to damage some individuals of some species for the overall good. Late burns may hurt snakes or baby rabbits. Fall burns destroy a lot of food that animals would otherwise eat in the winter. Many species are massively slaughtered by predators after burns, because they have lost all places to hide. Being who we are, we don't like hurting our animal neighbors. But being faint-hearted about essential decisions is the larger threat to the conservation of the whole, healthy ecosystems that so many species need.

One final repeat photo, to answer another question, asked by many (this last comment having nothing to do with woodcocks):

The question: "Does this photo show good prairie management?" 

First comment, this is not Somme Prairie Grove. We would have gathered up and burned all that downed wood. The wise Ray Schulenberg of the Morton Arboretum's Schulenberg Prairie, after long years of experience, taught us that rotting wood acidifies the soil, promotes Canada thistle and other non-prairie plants, and hurts many prairie species. We don't know of research on this, but our experience seems to confirm it. 

Other people would say that the clean-up is more work that it's worth, and the prairie will recover in time. So perhaps the jury is still out.

You'll notice that the brush is vigorously re-sprouting. It was not treated with herbicide. The plan here is to wait until the brush is well leafed out and then spray herbicide on foliage to kill re-sprouts and buckthorn seedlings. Then prairie species will be seeded in. You wouldn't do this to a high quality site. But to restore badly degraded land at a scale big enough to benefit rare animal populations, this may be a sound approach.

THANKS FOR EDITS: to Eriko Kojima and Kathy Garness. Suggestions and comments from others are invited.