Woodcock Banding, Spring 2010

Greetings from northern Michigan. After an unproductive week trying to locate woodcock in prime woodcock mating and nesting habitats in Benzie County, where the weather and ground conditions this spring have been unseasonably very dry, I've decided to abandon my woodcock banding efforts in NW Lower Michigan and search for woodcock near my cabin in NE Lower Michigan. For an entire week, Bruno and I searched outstanding woodcock mating and nesting habitats in Benzie and Leelanau Counties and despite locating scores of ruffed grouse, we alarmingly couldn't find a single woodcock anywhere! My decision to search for and band woodcock in NE Lower Michigan immediately paid off. En route to my cabin in northern Montmorency County, my GSP Bruno and I stopped to search for woodcock at one of our favorite woodcock banding and hunting locations in Otsego County. Within minutes, Bruno located a woodcock hen with chicks along a cedar-and-tag-alder swamp. We were unable to net the hen, but we did locate and band two woodcock chicks, both of which were amazingly well hidden (see above photo of one well-hidden chick--the woodcock chick is located among the leaves and ferns directly below the stick that is positioned from the upper left corner of the photo frame to the lower right corner--look for the chick's bill and right eye--do you see the chick now? For a clearer view of the chick, click on the photo to enlarge.). In my four years of banding woodcock in northern Michigan, I've never before seen woodcock chicks that have used the ground leaf litter and cover for concealment as well as these two chicks we banded today. Despite our serious efforts to locate additional chicks (normally a woodcock hen lays four eggs and rears four chicks every spring), we left wondering whether we had overlooked equally-as-well-hidden chicks as the two we found and banded today. We plan to stop back in a few days to see if we can locate chicks from this brood that we may have missed on this banding excursion.