Biologists use the word habitat to describe the physical places that wild creatures need in which to find food, rest, breed, and rear young.

In general, the best woodcock habitat (also called woodcock cover) consists of young, densely growing hardwood trees rooted in soil that supports ample numbers of earthworms, the birds' favorite food. Trees and shrubs found in typical woodcock habitat include aspen, alder, apple, birch, dogwood, crabapple, and hawthorn. However, it's not so much the types of trees and shrubs that supply woodcock needs, but how thickly those trees and shrubs grow in a given area.

Woodcock need somewhat different habitats depending on the activities they're engaged in, the time of day, the time of year, and weather conditions. General descriptions of each important habitat type follow. For more detailed information, click on singing grounds, feeding areas, roosting areas, and nesting areas.

Courtship Areas

In the spring, male woodcock stake out breeding territories called singing grounds. In these fairly open areas, the males call repeatedly and launch themselves into the air during dawn-and-dusk courtship flights aimed at attracting females. Singing grounds include log landings, clearings in wooded land, old fields, pastures, the grassy berms of country lanes and woods roads, and powerline right-of-ways. Singing grounds must lie close to areas of dense cover where the hens can nest and rear young.

Feeding Areas and Daytime Habitats

Woodcock feed and rest in the dense growth of brush, shrubs, and young forest. They thrive in abandoned farmland, including old apple orchards where the trees have become crowded by aspens, birches, dogwood, hawthorn, and other light-loving trees and shrubs. Woodcock favor areas with rich, moist soil, not far from slow-flowing rivers and streams or near ponds or wetlands.

Nesting and Brood-Rearing Cover

Females nest in young to mixed-age forests near or intermixed with feeding areas. They prefer stands of hardwoods less than 20 years old -- places where the stems are so thick that a person would have some trouble threading his or her way through. Hens will nest in cutover areas as few as two years after logging. They also nest in mixed-age woodland, with small pole-sized trees (up to 3 or 4 inches in diameter at breast height) above a dense shrub layer. There may be little overhead cover (as in old fields), or trees up to 50 feet tall, with the average cover height about 12 feet.

In general, nesting cover is somewhat drier than typical daytime feeding areas, but the two are often one and the same.

Roosting Areas

At dusk in summer and early fall, woodcock fly to open areas such as blueberry barrens, recently abandoned farmland, lightly grazed pastures, newly logged woods, and brushy pine plantations. Here, the birds roost -- not in trees, but sitting on the ground among the scattered growth of shrubs, weeds, and briars. The patchy overhead growth protects against owls and other airborne predators. Yet the cover is not so thick that it prevents a woodcock from hearing or seeing a prowling weasel or fox, and then taking to the air to escape.

Other Habitats

Woodcock may feed in stands of mature forest, if these wooded areas include a dense understory of smaller trees and shrubs. During drought, woodcock may seek out conifer stands, where the soil stays damp, letting the birds probe for earthworms. If woodcock get caught by early snowstorms in autumn, or late snowstorms after they return to the breeding range in spring, the birds may home in on spring seeps -- areas where the soil temperature stays high enough to remain snow-free, where the birds can probe and find food.

On the southern wintering range, woodcock spend their days in dense bottomland hardwoods, in areas of mixed pine and hardwoods, and in recently burned-over stands of longleaf pine.

Habitat Mosaics

An ideal area for woodcock would have an alder swale or other forested wetland at its core, surrounded by thick early successional daytime feeding habitats at slightly higher elevations and in patches of 5 or more acres. Singing grounds and roosting cover should be nearby.

Habitat Loss

Since the 1960s, the American woodcock has lost much of its habitat as people have converted brushy land into shopping centers, housing developments, roads, highways, industrial zones, and heavily farmed areas. Woodcock cannot live in such settings.

A second major factor in the loss of woodcock habitat -- and an accompanying decline in the species' population -- is that brushy areas have matured. Old abandoned farms, which used to offer ideal habitat, have now grown up to become forests. In general, across the woodcock's range, little clearcut logging has taken place in recent years, where stands of trees are removed and where sprouts spring up thickly. Wildfires -- which also create young, brushy growth -- have been suppressed. Despite the bird's name, the woodcock does not use mature forests of tall, thick-trunked trees, where the trees' interlinking canopies prevent light from reaching the ground and spurring the dense regrowth of smaller trees and shrubs.

Helping Woodcock

The Wildlife Management Institute and its federal, state, and private partners understand that the only way to reverse the recent downward trend of the woodcock population is to restore and create woodcock habitat. To this end, WMI and its partners work to rejuvenate overmature habitat by cutting it back and allowing it to regrow densely, and to create new habitat by identifying areas where woodcock can thrive and promoting responsible logging in those places.

The different regional initiatives -- in the Northern Forest, the New England/Mid-Atlantic Coast, the Appalachian Mountains, the Lower Great Lakes, and other areas in the woodcock's breeding and winter ranges -- will boost the timberdoodle population by providing the birds with the habitat crucial to their life's needs.