The Wonder of Woodcock

“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone?”

Memory, in its capricious way, played the old Joni Mitchell song in my mind while I waited for the drive to begin.
I kidded myself that the tune steadied my nerves, standing in front of that blackthorn thicket in warm, wet Ireland watching for my first European woodcock to spring. When the bird did eventually come, it flared upward like a bottle rocket before changing course so quickly and wildly that I shot without thinking. As sometimes happens, that un-aimed shot found its mark—and with that plump, russet ball of feathers in my hand, surprise at my success was replaced by longing and a hint of regret. Not for the dead bird, which I would eat, but for years long past, another place and another gamebird.

Decades previously I had worked in New York City and spent fall weekends following the American woodcock migration. That Irish woodcock’s cryptic chestnut-on-tan plumage and sad puppy eyes brought the bird’s cousin to mind. In Manhattan woodcock were known to fly into the Empire State Building as they attempted to negotiate their own reflection in the skyscraper’s windows. Foolish humanity built the world’s greatest city directly in the little bird’s flight path. I once watched from my suburban kitchen window for a full five minutes as a migratory woodcock butted repeatedly into a cyclone fence before I slipped outside and flushed it on its way.
My fascination with woodcock began when an upstate schoolteacher named Joe Henry offered to take me grouse hunting. Joe and I quickly bonded. (Both of our fathers had contracted rheumatic fever as youths that ended up killing them in their middle years.) Here’s what I remember of days spent afield in the Northeast almost a quarter-century ago: cold, clear, late-October mornings with golden maple leaves seesawing down from an ice-blue sky. After a breakfast of scrapple and eggs, Joe’s wife, Sara, would wave us goodbye and playfully suggest we should bring home “partridges” in the plural rather than our more usual “partridge” in the singular. For we didn’t typically hunt woodcock, per se; we shot them incidentally on ruffed grouse hunts.
We rarely drove Joe’s old pickup more than a few minutes on the gravel roads that ran through the forest around his home before getting out at a spot that, to me, looked no different than a half-dozen we’d passed. We wore red-check, woolen Pendleton shirts over brush pants fronted with a synthetic material that sounded like hell but kept the briers out, and bright-orange, DayGlo baseball caps. We saw no other hunters and few houses or buildings of any kind, only collapsed root cellars and tumbledown stonewalls. We walked parallel to one another, with Joe’s black Lab, Cody, quartering between us. Our grips on the Yankee doubles we carried would tighten as we’d approach orchards in want of pruning, for this is where the grouse, or as Joe called them, partridge, lived.
Mostly we heard birds flush without actually seeing them. Short square wings made a nasty racket that could startle even when—especially when—the bird was unseen. Joe would shout, “Bird!” to warn me, and I would see a feathered flash that often went un-saluted. One day on the edge of an exhausted farmstead in a grove of semi-flooded alder saplings, a bird took off vertically, paused briefly as it emerged from the young trees, and flew off horizontally with something of the unsteadiness of a knuckle ball.
Shortly afterward it happened again, and then again; but the second time I was ready. I threw up the old L.C. Smith I’d bought from Joe’s custodian and puffed the bird as it went from vertical to horizontal.
The woodcock in hand has little in common with the ruffed grouse. Yes, both birds have similarly cryptic plumage, but the woodcock has long tube-like mandibles with which to probe the soft, wet earth and Hoover up earthworms, woodlice and the like. And then there are the eyes. Woodcock eyes are endearingly mounted high on the sides of the head, like the waist blister windows on a Catalina flying boat, giving them all-around vision and helping with approaching predators. But the thing I remember most is just how tiny the birds seemed. If you disregarded the bill, they were not much bigger than a sparrow. Still they proved to be the most toothsome game I had ever eaten.
It would be poetic license to say I was hooked at the first flush, but in truth it was the experience of eating a woodcock—plucked, not skinned—on a piece of toast to catch the drippings, accompanied by foie gras, game chips and a quality burgundy that turned my head. And, to be honest, I found woodcock easier to shoot.
Regardless, I was hooked. I bought a gun (a delightful 51/2-pound 16-gauge by Pape of Newcastle) more suitable to my new quarry and began following the woodcock migrations. I hunted from Northern Maine to Southern New Jersey for years. My moment in woodcock heaven only ended when I moved west. I never thought I’d enjoy the hunting again, but I was wrong—though it took awhile.
Soon after moving to Washington I began writing for Shooting Sportsman, and one day my editor, Vic Venters, asked if I’d done any woodcock hunting and whether I’d be interested in joining him for a shoot in what once had been the grounds of Ashford Castle, in the west of Ireland. I pounced on the offer like a coyote on a vole.
Strangely, although I had grown up on the English side of the Scottish borders, I had never seen a European woodcock. Certainly migratory woodcock made landfall in the dunes along the Northumberland coast, but they were the property of wealthy landowners who would kill them on expensive driven pheasant shoots. All I’d ever shot as a lad had been pigeons and rabbits.
British shooting literature is filled with the hazards of the woodcock’s passage across the North Sea. J.W. Seigne tells of rafts of drowned birds: “... literally thousands of woodcock drowned off the Lowestoft-Yarmouth area,” victims of an adverse wind. (Commercial fishermen shipped them to game dealers in London.) In Game Birds, from 1928, Douglas Dewar describes an incident in which “over five hundred woodcock were picked up below the Point de Penmarch Lighthouse in Brittany,” apparently drawn like moths to a giant disorienting candle.
Woodcock are, unquestionably, unique gamebirds, and I felt privileged to be asked to go to Ireland, especially when I started to read about the coverts surrounding Ashford Castle, an estate once owned by the Guinness family of beer-brewing fame. As Cooperstown is to baseball, so Ashford Castle was to the lofty sport of woodcock shooting. Colin McKelvie, British author of the book Snipe & Woodcock, has called the place “the most famous and successful woodcock shoot in the world.” The surrounding woods were planted 200 years ago to provide woodcock cover where guests of the Guinness family could enjoy what was then one of the few winter sports. As recently as 1936, the wealthy brewers would place notices in the British sporting press:

Ringed Woodcock & Snipe
The Honourable Ernest Guinness, owner of the Ashford Estate, Cong, Co. Galway, has marked a number of young woodcock and snipe this year. The rings are stamped G. CONG 36 IRELAND.
He will be obliged if anyone into whose possession these woodcock or snipe may come will communicate with him at the above address.

The Guinnesses no longer own Ashford Estate, and Ashford Castle is now a posh hotel where Irish rock and movie stars honeymoon. And although the grounds have been split into smaller holdings, the woodcock still arrive each year. Because a new golf course has made inroads into what was formerly roosting habitat, it is unlikely the records set down by Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey, Bt., in the 1893 two-volume set Shooting, will ever be broken. “In 1884, six guns killed at Ashford Castle 172 woodcock in one day [January 14th] and on the same date in 1886, 177 fell to the same number of guns.”
I won’t soon forget the time I shot there with Vic. I was relieved when I came down to breakfast to see I had chosen clothing similar to the other Guns in our party: ubiquitous green Wellies, plus-two breeks, and Derby Tweed coats with cuffs elasticized against driving rain and huge bellows pockets suitable for a box of shells each. My gun was a sleek Italian over/under borrowed from guide David Ryan.
The half-dozen Guns were placed down one side of a copse while as many Irishmen ducked in from the other side and began approaching with dogs and sticks. Nothing came of it, and the beaters were as bemused as the Guns when they came face to face without a shot having been fired. Next I was placed along an edge with mature trees to my left, creating a roomy, airy space beneath a tall canopy. To my right was a temperate jungle with tangles and brambles in what appeared to be an impenetrable thicket.
“Get on, get on, get on, Rose. Whey oh, whey oh, whey oh. Up the cock, up the cock.” The advancing line of beaters and dogs, at first barely audible, became louder, their accents obviously Irish even at a shout. Then as they neared the end of the woods: “Cock up, cock up. Cock over!”
I heard two bangs and Vic curse, and suddenly the bird was above me. A great phantom bird, with a long beak drooping gracefully down, flitting and gliding, twisting and turning, silent as a bat as it deftly threaded its way through the bare branches. I shot once, and a plump, golden ball of feathers, an epicure’s dream, fell to the wet leaves. Picking up the bird, I noticed that she (it’s always “she” with woodcock for some reason) was at least twice the size of her American cousin and had a pale coral-pink breast instead of the more familiar rufescent bars. I replayed the shot in my head, committing every detail to memory, knowing that each woodcock kill inevitably becomes part of the colorful “craic” over thick pints of Guinness in the pub “session” afterward.
The seasonal serendipity that is woodcock shooting is made possible because, in the fall, birds from Scandinavia and the Baltic fly south to moister pastures in Western Ireland. (Whereas winter in Northern Europe is hard and white, in the west of Ireland it’s soft and green.) Conifer plantations and hazel thickets planted years ago provide diurnal cover for these nocturnal feeders. The migrants are magnificent plump creatures with plumage of rich chestnut, deep mahogany and dull gold, making them all but invisible on the forest floor.
As the first small stars make an uncertain appearance, woodcock make their way, walking as often as flying, into sheep meadows to probe the quagmire for food. On the ground they often look as if they’ve been wound up, with their mechanical, rocking gait. In flight it’s a different matter—the birds zigzagging confidently like stunt pilots negotiating pylons. With dawn’s early light, they flit back to the enchanted forest. Their behavior is largely similar in Scandinavia and Ireland, the main difference being that in their extensive forest breeding grounds they lead solitary lives, whereas in the small migratory coverts of Eire they are concentrated. It is the assembled congregations that make driven woodcock shooting possible.
On my best days in Maine or in Cape May, New Jersey, I have killed limits of three woodcock. On my visit to Ireland I shot three on one drive. Here’s how it happened:
Guide David Ryan had strung us out in a half-moon around a deep blackthorn thicket while he, his dogs and the rest of the beaters tunneled in from the other side. Almost immediately a woodcock appeared directly in front of me, and when it swerved to the right, I killed it. I reloaded and waited while David and his crew continued to beat the brush. A minute passed, and the familiar beaters’ chant grew no louder. Then another woodcock flew into the same gap as the first. This time it streaked over my head, and I turned and took it going away. The third bird appeared in the same favored gap before reversing itself and heading back the way it had come. I shot beneath the bird and heard it thump as it hit the ground.
It was, of course, a most wonderful shoot, and the woodcock is, indeed, a special bird. As Kipling should have said: “A pheasant is only a pheasant, but to shoot a woodcock is an event.” You had better get over there yourself before they put up a parking lot.

Author’s Note: For more information on woodcock shooting in Ireland, contact David Ryan, 011353-94-95-45956; davidryancong1@aircom.net.

Douglas Tate is an Editor at Large for Shooting Sportsman.