The Woodcock. 
The questions printed last autumn were these: 
1. Do woodcock breed in your locality, or do you see 
them only during flight? 
2. If they breed, are they numerous or scarce in sum¬ 
mer? How many nests have you heard of in any one 
year? Give the year. 
3. If they breed, do the home-bred birds disappear be¬ 
fore the flight birds come on, and about what time do the 
home-bred birds disappear? 
4. When does the flight begin? When do you see the 
first of those which you regard as flight birds? 
6. How long does the flight last? 
6. When are the flight birds present in greatest num¬ 
bers? Give not only date, but weather conditions on 
which the rush so largely depends. 
7. How late do you see the birds? 
8. How did the flights of the autumn of 1907, 1908 and 
1909 compare with the flights of the three years before 
1907? 
9. Please give any 'views that you may have which will 
throw any light on the problems of woodcock breeding 
and migration, and the ques¬ 
tion of whether they are at the 
present time, increasing or de¬ 
creasing in numbers. 
10. Is the colored man of the 
South a woodcock hunter to an 
important degree? What are 
his methods of capture? 
11. Is the open season in 
most Southern States too long 
considering the scarcity of 
woodcock? 
in other seasons it has straggled along for sev¬ 
eral days when, there was a run of exceptionally 
pleasant weather at the time. 
The migrating birds generally appear in great¬ 
est number around the 20th of October, but this 
year they were a few days ahead of the sched¬ 
ule, appearing about the i6th. 
As with all birds of passage after the main 
body has passed on, a scattered remnant con¬ 
tinues to straggle in for some time, and on sev¬ 
eral occasions I have picked up flight birds dur¬ 
ing the middle of November, and in three or 
four instances both flight and native birds on 
Thanksgiving day. These were years when In¬ 
dian summer had run well into the month and 
the earth yet lay moist and unfrozen along the 
brooksides. 
The flights of 1907, 1908 and 1909 appear to 
have shown a gradual decrease over the three 
Bradford, Mass. — Editor 
Forest and Stream: As a 
keen admirer of that best 
of all sporting birds, the 
woodcock, I take pleasure 
in responding to your re¬ 
quest for data concerning 
its movements and present 
abundance in this vicinity. 
Woodcock breed in this 
neighborhood each spring, 
but very sparingly. 
As the great majority of 
birds pass on to the north¬ 
ward and but few remain 
to nest, one has to do con¬ 
siderable tramping before 
finding these in the summer 
swamps. Except for three 
nests which 1 have been fortunate in locating 
during the past two seasons, I know of but one ' 
being found near here . This was in the 
spring of 1908 when I discovered two sets 
of eggs. My third set I stumbled on in early 
May of igog. 
The native bred birds, so far as I have been 
able to determine, do not leave us before the 
flight comes on; in fact, I have good reason 
to believe they linger long after the flight has 
passed—in other words until really forced to 
go by severe weather; actually frozen out. 
As a rule the flight begins to reach us about 
the middle of October and is usually at full tide 
during the week of the 20th. This is not al¬ 
ways so, for weather conditions serve more or 
less to influence it. Some years it has seeme'd 
to hurry by and to be over in three days, while 
IT LOOKED THAT WAY. 
THE MONKEY—GREAT GUNS ! ROOSEVELT JUST GONE, AND NOW HERE COMES THE KAISER! 
Copyright, 1910. By permission. 
From Puck. 
previous years, in. the covers with which I am 
most familiar. 
From the present outlook it must be apparent 
to all close observers that the woodcock has not 
been holding his own of late years. All of us 
wh<# have followed him to any extent during 
the past decade are aware that there has been 
a gradual decline in numbers, and viewing the 
situation from all sides it is my opinion that 
the sportsman cannot be held chiefly responsi¬ 
ble for the rapidly thinning ranks of this bird. 
Rather is it the clearing and settling up of the 
land, the extension of agriculture and the spread 
of population that is fast taking care of the 
woodcock’s future. 
Year after year sees his limited range becom¬ 
ing narrower and more confined by the con¬ 
tinual ditching and draining of marsh and low¬ 
land. Land is becoming too valuable to remain 
in primitive state, and the demand for products 
of the soil requires that larger and larger tracts 
of favorable cover be reclaimed annually for the 
plow and harrow. More than that, the indis¬ 
criminate cutting away of the woodland tends 
to aid in the work of extermination. Near here 
and within ten minutes’ walk of where I write, 
there lies a territory which in days gone by was 
famous cock cover, indeed. Time was when 
local nimrods were given to making boastful 
reference in regard to this place, because of the 
number of birds that frequented it annually 
while on the southern flight; and it was known 
the county over for the sport it furnished. 
Six years ago a stand of heavy pine land that 
sheltered the spring heads from which flowed 
the brooks that watered this cover was cut 
away, and with no protecting shade to shield 
them from the sun’s hot 
rays, the streamlets soon 
became a thing of the past, 
and to-day are dry as the 
proverbial bone, the wood¬ 
cock pass it by, for there 
is no longer any damp fat 
soil to attract them. 
Give the wild things a 
sufficiency of protecting 
cover and they will survive 
both man and civilization, 
but rob them of their natu¬ 
ral environment and it is 
inevitable that they vanish 
rapidly. 
’Tis true the man with 
the gun, the fire hunters of 
Louisiana canebrakes and 
the far South, together with 
natural enemies, combine 
to make heavy inroads on 
the woodcock’s numbers, 
but he might withstand all 
this were there left a suffi¬ 
cient area of sheltering 
range. Unlike other up¬ 
land game he will not take 
kindly to the new state of 
affairs and cannot adjust 
himself to meet the changed conditions, for his 
food is in the queachy bog and swamp land 
mire, and when that goes, so too must he. 
It was my good fortune to spend several days 
among the woodcock in the Southern pine woods 
a year ago last January, and throughout the ter¬ 
ritory with which I became acquainted, viz.: the 
coast section of North Carolina, I can state 
definitely that the negro—in that portion of the 
South, at least—cannot be considered a wood¬ 
cock hunter. They have not the dogs necessary 
to insure success, and the birds—inhabiting as 
they do for the most part dense wet tangles, 
deep in the pine lands—require hunting of a 
character that proves a bit too strenuous for 
the average black. There they may be con¬ 
sidered reasonably safe from his attacks. 
As regards the length of the open season, I 
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