Studying the woodcock and its migrating habits

Sitting beside an evening campfire, I heard the first peent. The first woodcock started his sky dance behind our house. I thought back to a conversation I had with Ken Blomberg with the Wisconsin Woodcock Project a few weeks prior at an RGS/ AWS event he was speaking at.

Ken started banding woodcock forty years ago in the Junction City area, where he raised his family, taught his boys how to hunt, trained dogs, and banded woodcock. In between all that, he also authored three books. But Ken wasn’t talking to the group about that, he was talking about a project placing GPS transmitters on Wisconsin woodcock this banding season.

“There are so many questions that I would like to see answered about these wonderful little birds,” he told the group. “One is, do hens produce more than one brood a year?”

Ken explained that less than 10 years ago the common thinking said woodcock migrated five to 10 miles a night - south in the fall and north in the spring. The same thinking said they flew just above the treetops and most certainly couldn’t fly across Lake Superior from Canada. But questions arose when a Canadian banded bird would be shot in Wisconsin. How did it get here? How did Michigan banded birds get harvested in Canada? How do you explain that at a migration rate of five miles a day a woodcock wouldn’t make it out of Wisconsin before the ground froze and woodcock eat worms? In 2017 a study from the University of Maine shed light on these questions and turned the common thinking about woodcock on its head. Ken wants to bring that same study to Wisconsin woodcock and so does the University of Maine professor that started this research. “When I first started banding woodcock,” Ken told me earlier that evening. “We found the birds with pointing dogs, then we netted the chicks, and hopefully the hen. You could get up to five birds with a find. Today all the capture is done by mist nets.”

“I started taking my son Erik out with me while banding woodcock when he was three,” he continued. “When we finished with the first bird, just before I released it, I told him we have one last thing to do and that’s to give it a kiss on the back of the head. I showed him, he kissed it, then we let it go.”

The 2017 study placed GPS transmitters on woodcock that tracked their movements up to nine months when they fall off. In more recent years they added ARGOS PTT which transmits the altitude the birds fly at.

The first year’s data showed flights over 400 miles in one night. The longest recorded flight has been 630 miles. The highest altitude for a woodcock to fly is 7800 feet.

On April 11, 2019 a female woodcock left Maryland and flew to Pennsylvania, than onto Ontario, back down to Michigan. From there she flew east across Lake Michigan to land just west of Wausau. After a late April snowstorm she flew 23 miles south into Portage County where she later nested. That woodcock had the transmitter originally placed on it in Maine.

The study has identified over 31,000 locations in 33 states and seven Canadian provinces of woodcock habitat. It has proven woodcock nest in southern states on their migration north – woodcock chicks leave their mothers at four weeks of age. And it’s proven they can fly across Lake Superior. This study may hold the key to reversing the decades long decline in the woodcock population.

Two years ago, a project in Minnesota started placing those same transmitters on woodcock. Our DNR and UW have no plans to start a program doing so in Wisconsin, which is where Ken and his banding partner, with their love of woodcock, come in.

This local project has a cost of $7800. Ken has started a Go Fund Me page called the Wisconsin Woodcock Research Project. The evening I talked to Ken, the Chippewa Valley Chapter of the Ruffed Grouse Society and American Woodcock Society presented him with a check for $1,000 toward the project, but there is still a long way to go.

Just before Professor Erik Blomberg released the hen that flew across the lake landing almost where he grew up and banded his first woodcock, he kissed the bird on the back of her head and let her fly off.

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