More than the latest "It Bird"
New to woodcocks? Sit down. They’ve been famous for centuries.
New York City is a city of Main Characters, and every so often one of them is a bird. Recently, a turkey named Astoria has been attracting paparazzi around Manhattan. A New York Times profile described her as “about as tall as a toddler, with iridescent hues of orange and blue in her brown feathers, an elegant neck, a healthy figure and wings that have helicopter-like strength.” Before Astoria, Flaco the Eurasian Eagle Owl escaped from the Central Park Zoo and lived on pigeons and rats for a year before dying in a window strike (here’s Flaco’s New York Times obituary). Before Flaco was Barry, the resident Barred Owl of Central Park (struck by a car in 2021, here’s her NYT eulogy). Before Barry was Hot Duck, and before that the Red-tailed Hawk named Pale Male (after a 33-year residency, he also earned an obituary in the New York Times).
Now, it seems like the Bryant Park Woodcock has broken containment. Its celebrity status, too, has been confirmed by the inevitable New York Times profile. If you spend any time on social media (twitter is my poison of choice, but these birds are ecumenical), you’ve probably seen a woodcock dance, nap, and slurp up worms, seemingly oblivious to the ogling crowds.
The Bryant Park Woodcock isn’t actually an individual. It’s more of a rotating position, like an alderman or court jester. Every spring and fall, as woodcocks migrate up and down the Atlantic flyway, woodcocks inevitably get pulled into this green postage-stamp surrounded by skyscrapers in the middle of Manhattan. It’s long been known to birders that Bryant Park is possibly the most reliable place to get a close-up view of these strange, reclusive birds in the entire country. But now the word has gotten out.
Please forgive the quality of this video I took through my binoculars at Bryant Park in March, 2022. If you’d like, imagine Tarantella Napoletana playing in the background.
Their sudden popularity shouldn’t be a surprise. Woodcocks have a funny face. They make a funny sound. They do a funny dance. There’s arguably no American bird that’s goofier. One Smithsonian Magazine write-up speculated that “the newfound fame of Bryant Park’s woodcocks might be the most attention the species has ever received.”
Any time wild birds make the news is a win in my book. But I will take issue with Smithsonian Magazine’s statement. Like most of the birds I write about here, woodcocks used to be much better known than they are today. I’m not missing my chance to share several centuries of woodcock lore.
As far back as the 1600s, the European colonization of America created a mosaic of regional ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups, and each one invented names for the birds they found. For some birds, the list of names got quite long—one writer collected ninety-seven for the Ruddy Duck. This wealth of earthly and often humorous names was nothing but a confusing mess to the American Ornithologists’ Union, however, and in 1886 they published an official list that proved remarkably successful at replacing chaos with order. In the following decades, folk names faded away entirely as the market and subsistence hunters who invented them died off and as new bird-lovers learned “correct” names from field guides.
But with the woodcock—and as far as I’m aware, only the woodcock—have these vernacular names survived. Exceedingly few American birds have widely-known nicknames. Birders call Yellow-rumped Warblers “butter-butts” and Cooper’s Hawks “coops,” but the list isn’t much longer than that. Yet most birders know that “timberdoodle” means woodcock, and real fans still call them Labrador twister and bog-sucker.
When you look at a bird with a lot of old folk names, there’s a good chance it got them because they were widely hunted. And there was no game bird more beloved than the woodcock. As the ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush wrote in 1925, “According to the accepted definition of a game bird our Woodcock is supreme. It lies close, rises to a convenient height, offers a quick shot on the wing and when brought to the table is a most luscious and delectable morsel for the epicure.”1
These birds had a way of drawing flowery dedications from the most stoic of hunters. Here’s William Jarvis writing about woodcocks in 1890:
“In the list of birds pursued with dog and gun, there is one that has a lasting claim upon the affections of a sportsman, both on account of its beauty and the mystery that surrounds its ways; a bird of mighty wanderings and daily rest; a bird with eyes large, dark, and deep, in whose depths the glories of an autumnal sky and landscape are reflected in miniature; a bird with the magic power to turn its admirer from all feathered game.”2
And Arthur Cleveland Bent, in 1927:
“This mysterious hermit of the alders, this recluse of the boggy thickets, this wood nymph of crepuscular habits is a common bird and well distributed in our Eastern States, widely known, but not intimately known.”3
Woodcocks weren’t just hunted for fun. They were hunted because people loved to eat them, and would pay a generous price for the privilege. “Thousands of persons besides you and myself are fond of Woodcock shooting,” wrote John James Audubon in 1835. These woodcocks, he continued, were “killed in almost incredible numbers . . . and our markets are amply supplied with it during its season.” In his 1867 survey of every food item for sale in the public markets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, Thomas De Voe wrote of the woodcock that “this highly prized bird . . . brings the highest price of any bird brought to our markets. Its flesh is no doubt the most delicate eating of all birds known.”4
According to Audubon, some gourmands ate woodcocks “with all their viscera, worms and insects to boot, the intestines in fact being considered the most savoury parts.” He himself disagreed about the intestines, which he “never conceived suitable articles of food for man.” Even so, he became near-ecstatic remembering the taste of the birds while traveling in Scotland.
The most simple and refined way of eating woodcock was served on toast, but go to a fancy restaurant or hotel and there was no limit to how elaborate the woodcocks could get. Here’s a recipe for “Salmi of Woodcock a la Chasseur,” circa 1890, which was served at Delmonico’s, the most exclusive restaurant in New York City.
To supply these wealthy urban markets, professional hunters from Minnesota to Florida would harvest woodcocks by the barrel—skilled hunters were known to shoot a hundred in a day—and ship them by refrigerated railcar to New York or Chicago. A single barrel could fit four hundred woodcocks, which might sell for three hundred dollars in the 1880s—equivalent to nearly ten thousand dollars today.
Market hunters killed so many of these birds that sportsmen worried that their favorite game animal and pastime would vanish entirely. A perennial refrain, which never quite bore out, was that overhunting by lower-class market and subsistence hunters would drive the woodcock extinct.
Here’s Frank Forester warning about their disappearance in the 1850s:
“Enact! enact! and save our gentle, well-born woodcock; preserve our harmless occupation from the untimely end which threatens it.”5
And a writer for Harper’s Weekly in 1897:
“Altogether he is one of the finest of our American game birds . . . And yet, I fear, this beautiful and wily game bird is doomed to share the fate of the wild-turkey, which has become so scarce and is on the road to extinction . . . The axe is more fatal to the woodcock than the gun. Then, again, the woodcock cannot be preserved as the pheasant is in England . . . So his extermination is certain.6
And William Temple Hornaday, in 1913:
“Either give the woodcock of the eastern United States just ten times the protection that it now has, or bid the species a long farewell.7
And it was this sort of concern that gave birth to the conservation movement. High-class sportsmen used their political leverage to pass laws restricting woodcock hunting to those that hunted them in a sportsmanlike way, a campaign that eventually eliminated the market for game animals entirely, provided absolute protection for non-game birds, and aimed to regulate sustainable use for game birds.
I don’t think woodcocks were ever that close to going extinct, but the concern wasn’t entirely unjustified. Sportsmen had watched turkeys disappear from the east, Heath Hens dwindle and die off, and Passenger Pigeons vanish completely, all because of overhunting.
Since 1918, woodcock hunting has been tightly regulated by federal law. And although there aren’t any reliable population estimates from that era, anecdotes suggest that the following decades saw a recovery in woodcock numbers, supported by strict enforcement of hunting limits and an expansion of their preferred early-succession forest habitat resulting from abandoned farms.
By the 1970s, around 700,000 hunters killed two million woodcocks every year, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service considered a sustainable harvest against a total population of five to seven million birds. Since then, the popularity of woodcock hunting has steadily fallen. By 2012, only about 160,000 hunters pursued woodcocks, together harvesting about 350,000 birds each year.
It’s not just woodcock hunters that have been disappearing. The number of woodcocks, too, has fallen by one to two percent every year since the seventies. The same abandoned farms that provided ideal woodcock habitat during the thirties are now mature forests that woodcocks no longer find useful. Combined with fire suppression and suburban development, woodcocks have much less of the young, brushy habitat they depend on. Today there’s somewhere between 3.5 and 5 million woodcocks in America. Returning their population to 1970s levels would require restoring 32,000 square miles of young forest—roughly the area of South Carolina.
Hunting and habitat loss aren’t the only threats that we’ve imposed on these bizarre birds, and this brings us back to Bryant Park. Like many birds, woodcocks migrating by night over cities are confused and drawn in by the glow of streetlights. The lucky ones find an oasis of green amid the miles of concrete and steel. Possibly because their eyes are set so far back on their heads, woodcocks have a particularly hard time navigating urban environments. Every year, thousands are stunned or killed by crashing into windows they confuse for open sky. Unfortunately, many of the birds that land in Bryant Park don’t make it out alive.
Woodcocks aren’t at imminent risk of extinction, like turn-of-the-century sportsmen predicted. But the forces eating away at woodcock numbers all contribute to the deeply concerning loss of three billion birds from North America since 1970. A world with fewer woodcocks is a world less weird and wonderful. Awareness of these birds, and the toll that our built environment exacts on their populations, is indispensable for their protection. But it’s only the first step.
Forbush, Edward Howe. Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States: Water birds, marsh birds and shore birds. United States: Berwick and Smith Company, 1925.
Leffingwell, William Bruce. Shooting On Upland, Marsh, And Stream: a Series of Articles Written by Prominent Sportsmen, Descriptive of Hunting the Upland Birds of America. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1890.
Bent, Arthur Cleveland. 1927. Smithsonian Institution United States National Museum Bulletin 142 (Part 1): 61-78. United States Government Printing Office.
De Voe, Thomas Farrington. The Market Assistant. United States: Hurd and Houghton, 1867.
Herbert, Henry William. Frank Forester’s Fugitive Sporting Sketches. ed. Pond, Fred. Westfield, Wisconsin. 1879.
Harper’s Weekly,”The Woodcock and His Ways,” October 2, 1897, vol. 41 pg. 976.
Hornaday, William Temple. Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation. United States: C. Scribner's sons, 1913.
A wonderful read and I particularly enjoyed reading the obituaries of some of the more "famous" of the birds.
Great, entertaining, and informative essay. Thank you.