Tag Archives: american woodcock

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: The Woodcocks of Alewife Reservation

Posted on March 27, 2020 by William Freedberg

American Woodcocks appear to be thriving at the Alewife Reservation in Cambridge, an urban wild sandwiched between office complexes and a subway garage. Despite the myriad dangers of city life, up to a dozen woodcocks perform their aerial mating displays over Alewife every March.

Resilience against the odds

Alewife is awash in threats to these hapless birds. Peregrine Falcons occasionally snag woodcocks in midair as they hunt along the clifflike walls of a brutalist-era parking garage. The expansive glass façade of the recently-expanded office park looms over the adjacent greenspace, causing fatal window collisions. Feral cats prowl around the urban wetland’s thickets. Heavy metals and pollutants from long ago still linger in the soil.

At Alewife, small patches of woodlands, wetlands, and fields persist amid urban infrastructure and new development.

And yet, at least a handful of woodcocks return here every year. In early spring, they give their explosive, nasal calls at dusk, leap into the sky, and twist and turn in midair to attract a mate. Once paired off, they nest and raise young in nearby woodlands.

Is it a trap?

It’s worth considering that this urban wild might be what’s known as an “population sink,” or “ecological trap.”

An ecological trap is any low-quality habitat where more birds die than can successfully reproduce, but which attracts birds even when there’s safer places for them nearby. Traps can appear to have a stable population of birds, when in fact most of those birds die before being replaced as more birds are lured in from safe areas.

A population sink, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily attract birds more than areas with suitable habitat. Rather, birds end up there as “overflow,” when better territories are fully occupied or made inaccessible. Sinks don’t cause as steep declines, but do put a cap on the birds that can successfully reproduce in an area.

So, it’s entirely possible that Alewife isn’t doing the woodcock population any favors. No woodcock nests have been found in the area, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re failing to reproduce.

Brushy fields are all you need

Whether or not Alewife is a net plus or minus for its resident woodcocks, data from the rest of the country show that habitat availability is the main factor limiting woodcock abundance.

The strange, lumpy, long-billed form of an American Woodcock (Scolopax minor). Photo: Will Freedberg

Woodcocks love fields with low, woody brush, and adjacent mature forest. They display in springtime over open, grassy areas, but need some cover—ideally patches of shrubs or grass 2’-5’ high—for shelter. They use forest to forage during the rest of the year, especially when they’re raising young.

Without disturbance, either by fire, mowing, or agriculture, brushy fields revert to forest in a couple of decades. This is the story of woodcock habitat across Massachusetts: most ex-farmland has reverted to forest. Remaining fields are farmed more intensively, leaving less and less brushy patches and edge habitat, and fallow fields are becoming rarer.

Mass Audubon’s Foresters for the Birds program is emphasizing the value of young forest and shrubland habitat for birds. By educating foresters and landowners on bird-friendly forestry practices, we’re trying to create more habitat for woodcocks and other young forest specialists.

Where Do Woodcocks Go In The Snow?

Posted on March 27, 2018 by William Freedberg

When winter weather drags on into late March, our earliest spring migrants still show up on schedule!  Birders often hear the sharp, reedy “peent!” of American Woodcocks in mild weather amid other spring sounds, like the clamor of wood frogs and spring peepers. Hearing them calling from fields covered in several feet of snow can seem incongruous. So how does lingering snow affect these enigmatic birds’ ability to find food?

Beak Superpowers

Woodcocks find insects by probing underground with their beaks. The tips of their beaks pack a bundle of highly sensitive nerves, which they use to pick up on vibrations from insects moving in the soil.

The tip of their beak can also flex open while the rest of it stays closed, allowing woodcocks to delicately pick up food without having to pry their whole bill open underground. The ability to open just the end of the beak is called distal rhyncokinesis  (rine-co-kin-EE-sis), or simply rhycokinesis  when discussing beak flexibility more generally. It’s a trait shared by many members of the sandpiper family, woodcocks included.


This photo only partially shows how flexible the tip of a woodcock bill is– underground,  they can close the lower two thirds and move just the outer third. (Photo: Will Freedberg) 

 

With such particular feeding habits, spring snowstorms might seem to spell trouble for these ground-dwelling insect-eaters. In particular, 2018 has seen a spate of nor’easters barreling through New England, dumping foot after foot upon snow.

Snowed-in Woodcocks Seek Open Ground

Woodcocks can often feed successfully through a shallow layer of snow, but only if the ground is not frozen through. If the ground has already thawed, a covering of snow will in fact keep the ground from freezing fully again, if temperatures return below freezing.

But March 2018 has seen snowpack deeper than a woodcock’s bill is long, even when the ground hasn’t been frozen solid. In years like this, woodcocks feed near any natural features that keep snow off the ground—along the banks of streams and flowing water, or under coniferous trees that partially shelter the ground from snow.

Birders in the know will look for them in these areas, and are careful not to scare or flush these easily-stressed birds. Their flight displays have continued along the edges of fields so far regardless of snow cover, and should keep going into April.

For more tips on how to find woodcocks, check out our list of sites and programs!