The American Woodcock (Scolopax minor)—the timberdoodle—is a landlocked shorebird of the forest floor, declining at roughly 1% annually since 1968. Its survival depends on early successional forest habitat and on a remarkable alliance between hunters and scientists. A Michigan banding program has logged more woodcock data than anywhere else on Earth.
The Hunters Who Guard What They Hunt
On a gray May morning in the aspen woods of Gladwin County, Michigan, Jerrie Schultz releases his setter, Sage, into the bare-limbed forest. They are not hunting. Not exactly. Sage’s nose sweeps the soggy leaf litter for woodcock scent—and when she locks on point, Schultz shuffles forward, drops a pink marking ribbon, and begins the careful work of banding woodcock chicks so small they fit in a closed fist.
Schultz, a retired automotive engineer from Frankenmuth, has spent more than two decades doing this every spring. He is one of roughly 100 volunteer banders participating in Michigan’s spring woodcock banding program—a network that has logged more than 38,000 banded birds since 1981, more than any other state or province in the world5. Each October, he hunts the same species through these same covers. Come May, he guards their chicks.
“Banding is how I give back to the species as a hunter,” Schultz has said. “I know the information I gather every spring helps scientists learn more about the bird and what it needs to thrive.”5
This is the central irony and beauty of the timberdoodle’s conservation story. The people most likely to save the American Woodcock are, in fact, the same people who pursue it through autumn covers with bird dogs and shotguns. In Michigan, they have built the world’s leading woodcock research program, and the data they gather directly shapes federal hunting regulations across the eastern United States and Canada.
A Partnership Built on Paradox
John Burroughs understood the project: “But if I relate the bird in some way to human life, to my own life, show what it is to me and what it is in the landscape and the season, then do I give my reader a live bird and not a labeled specimen.” Quote ID: IN-004 The timberdoodle is nothing if not a live bird. And the story of its survival is nothing if not human.
Conservation: Historical Baseline (Burroughs Era)
John Burroughs wandered the woodlands of New York’s Hudson Valley for most of his natural life. He catalogued warblers and thrushes with the patience of a man who had nowhere to be. Of the woodcock—one of the strangest birds in eastern North America—he left almost nothing in Wake-Robin. A single field note, among his observations of moist ground: “there, a woodcock,” Quote ID: 2-138 recorded almost incidentally among prints in the mud.
That brevity says everything. In 1871, a woodcock encounter required no annotation. The bird was ordinary—as expected in the wet alder thickets and second-growth tangles of the Hudson Valley, as the mud itself.
The Accidental Abundance
Moreover, the woodcock’s habitat requirements were being met accidentally across the northeastern United States. The agricultural economy was fracturing. Farms were being abandoned as families moved to cities and the frontier opened west. As a result, cleared pastures reverted to brush. Old fields grew dense with alder, aspen, and hawthorn. This accidental abundance of brushy early successional habitat—scrubland nobody valued—was, for the American Woodcock, a golden age.
“It is this period that marks the return of the birds,” Burroughs wrote, describing the procession of spring migrants as creatures woven inseparably into the rhythms of the agricultural landscape. Quote ID: 1-002
The woodcock belonged to that procession—an early-arriving migrant whose earthworm-rich feeding grounds were everywhere: moist alder flats, overgrown orchards, regenerating clearcuts, the wet margins of abandoned farms1.
There were almost certainly millions of woodcock across eastern North America. Nobody was counting.
That indifference would eventually become a problem. The landscape that made the woodcock abundant was not stable. It was successional. And succession moves in only one direction.
Conservation: The Decline
The American Woodcock Singing Ground Survey (SGS) launched in 1968—the first systematic attempt to count displaying male woodcock each spring across the species’ range. What the data revealed was already a well-established trend3.
Since 1968, woodcock populations have declined at approximately 0.86% per year in the Eastern Management Region and 0.53% per year in the Central Management Region3. The most recent 10-year data (2013–2023) is worse: the Eastern region declined at −1.18% annually, the Central at −1.25%3. By the most conservative estimates, the continental population has fallen more than 50% since the 1960s. The 2022 recruitment index in the Eastern Region—young birds entering the population—was 24.9% below the long-term regional average3.
Hunters were blamed first. They were the most visible variable. Yet, the data pointed elsewhere.
Studies found that hunting pressure, which itself collapsed from approximately 1.5 million birds per year in the 1970s to roughly 170,000 per year in 2020, could not account for the scale or geography of the decline1. The real driver was the landscape itself—specifically, its recovery.
The Real Culprit: Forest Succession
The abandoned farms of Burroughs’s era had been growing for a century. By the 1960s and 1970s, the alders and aspens that colonized those old fields were reaching middle age. Canopies closed. Consequently, the shrubby, moist understory that woodcock need for feeding, nesting, and brood-rearing—dense stands of young hardwoods less than 20 years old with workable soil and abundant earthworms—grew up and out. Natural forest succession, the same process that restores ecological diversity over the long run, eliminated woodcock habitat faster than any hunter’s shot. Accidental abundance became systematic subtraction11.
Urbanization compounded the loss further. Brushy edge habitat that once connected woodland patches across the Northeast was converted to development at exactly the moment the woodcock needed it most. This led to the American Woodcock being squeezed from two directions simultaneously: mature forests replacing young ones, and young ones being paved.
Secondary Threats and a Notable Exception
Meanwhile, a secondary threat emerged from the woodcock’s own biology. Because the species forages almost exclusively on earthworms, it ingests whatever the earthworms have ingested—including lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals that accumulate in agricultural and suburban soils1. The woodcock is a biological accumulator, carrying a record of soil contamination in its tissues. This contamination is unlikely to drive population-level collapse on its own, but it adds chronic metabolic stress to birds already challenged by habitat loss.
Nevertheless, one geographic exception is worth noting. Minnesota showed a significant long-term increase in singing male woodcock through the SGS monitoring period—the only state with a positive long-term trend4,. The divergence points directly toward the mechanism: where young aspen forests are actively managed and perpetually renewed, woodcock can hold or increase. Where they are left to grow old, the birds disappear.
The species was telling anyone who listened what it needed. Fewer people were listening than should have been.
Conservation: The Recovery (In Progress)
The Ammann Protocol
In the early days of Michigan’s woodcock banding program, Dr. George “Andy” Ammann tried catching birds with smelt-dipping nets. It didn’t work. Ammann—a wildlife biologist with the Michigan DNR and one of the most respected ruffed grouse and woodcock researchers of his generation—had the right idea but the wrong tool.
His insight, once he found the right method, was transformative. A well-trained pointing dog would locate woodcock hens on or near their nests, hold a precise point, and allow biologists to flush the hen and band the chicks without injury or nest abandonment. The technique required dogs with extraordinary steadiness: to flush, to scatter chicks, and to navigate the organized chaos of a banding operation in dense cover. Ammann spent years developing and testing it7.
“I remember going out with Dad in the early days of woodcock banding with a smelt-dipping net trying to catch the birds,” his son Larry Ammann recalled after Andy’s death in 2008. “It didn’t work. Dad knew there had to be a better way.”7
That better way became what is now called the Ammann Protocol. Formalized in his 1981 book A Guide to Capturing and Banding American Woodcock Using Pointing Dogs, published by the Ruffed Grouse Society, the method is the global standard for woodcock research7. Andy Ammann passed away in 2008 at the age of 98. Even to this day, every woodcock banding program operating in North America runs on the protocol he built in Michigan’s aspen forests in the 1960s.
The Volunteer Network and a Plan at Scale
The Michigan DNR has run a spring woodcock banding program since 19608. By 2010, the volunteer network had grown to nearly 100 banders spending approximately 1,800 hours afield annually8. In 2019, 74 volunteers spent 2,052 hours in the field and banded 1,110 birds8.
Since 1981, Michigan has banded more than 38,000 woodcock—approximately 20,000 more than the next most productive state, Maine5. This Citizen Science Revolution—hunters, retirees, engineers, and dog trainers collecting biological data under DNR supervision—generates a dataset that directly informs bag limits and season dates across the Atlantic and Central Flyways8.
In 2008, the Wildlife Management Institute published the first American Woodcock Conservation Plan, a range-wide blueprint covering 19 states and six Canadian provinces11. The plan’s central finding: to restore woodcock populations to 1970s levels, approximately 21.3 million acres of early successional habitat must be created or restored across the species’ range11. Hunting is not the management lever. Habitat is.
The Adirondack demonstration project shows what that looks like in practice. In 2006, The Lyme Timber Company acquired approximately 278,000 acres in New York’s Adirondack Park and found just 76 acres in a young forest condition suitable for woodcock. Working with the Wildlife Management Institute, Lyme modified its harvest operations to create early successional habitat at the landscape scale12. By the time the project received a Sustainable Forestry Initiative Conservation Leadership Award, the company had created nearly 11,000 additional acres of suitable habitat—with a goal of more than 15,000 acres, approximately five percent of the property12. Woodcock detections on monitored survey routes tripled between 2006 and 2010. Seventy-six acres became a movement.
Conservation: Current Status
The American Woodcock is not federally threatened or endangered. Partners in Flight assigns it a Continental Concern Score of 12 out of 20 and estimates the global breeding population at 3.5 million birds1. Still, the SGS continues to document long-term negative trends in most of the eastern range, and the most recent decade shows the decline accelerating in both management regions3.
However, the species may be more resilient than the numbers alone suggest. In 2024, University of Rhode Island researcher Colby Slezak—now a USFWS biologist—published landmark findings in Proceedings of the Royal Society B documenting the first confirmed evidence of itinerant breeding in American Woodcock9. The study, which GPS-tracked more than 350 female woodcock between 2019 and 2022, found that approximately 80% of females nested more than once during spring migration, with some nesting as many as six times10. Females traveled an average of 500 miles between first and second nest attempts. Migration and reproduction, conventionally understood as separate life-history events, overlap for the American Woodcock. They breed on the move.
This behavioral flexibility may matter enormously for the species’ future. Itinerant breeders can exploit patchwork habitats across a vast geographic range rather than depending on precise conditions at a single destination. “As long as some suitable habitat remains,” Slezak noted, “the consequences may be less.”10
Meanwhile, the umbrella species framework embedded in the 2008 Conservation Plan continues to expand the program’s reach. Creating woodcock habitat—young, moist, brushy forest—simultaneously benefits more than 50 other wildlife species: white-tailed deer, bobcat, golden-winged warbler, New England cottontail, whip-poor-will, and others whose populations have declined in parallel11. The timberdoodle’s cause is not a single-species campaign. It is a full ecosystem restoration dressed in brown-mottled camouflage.
Identification: American Woodcock
Quick ID Box
| Feature | American Woodcock (Scolopax minor) |
|---|---|
| Size | Robin-sized; plump, compact; 10–12 inches long |
| Bill | Extremely long (2.5–2.75 inches), straight; prehensile tip |
| Plumage | Mottled brown, black, buff, and gray; clean buffy-salmon underparts |
| Head | Large, rounded; bold horizontal crown bars; huge dark eye set high and toward rear of skull |
| Legs | Short, pinkish-gray |
| Flight | Explosive flush; broad rounded wings; high-pitched wing twitter |
| Habitat | Young forest floors, wet alder thickets, early successional scrub |
| When Active | Crepuscular and nocturnal; most visible at dusk and dawn in spring |
Visual Description
The woodcock is built like a bird assembled from the wrong blueprint. Plump where shorebirds are lean, short-legged where they are tall, forest-dwelling where they belong on mudflats. Its camouflage against dead leaves and last year’s ferns is so complete that experienced birders step on them2.
The bill defines the bird: 2.5 to nearly 3 inches long, disproportionate on a robin-sized body, straight and needle-like. The eyes sit high and toward the rear of the skull, providing near-360° vision while the bird’s head is angled down during probing1. Even more unusual: the ears are positioned forward of the eyes, between the bill base and the eye sockets—anatomically inverted from virtually every other bird species9. The woodcock watches the sky behind it while its ears listen to what is ahead.
Field Marks
The clean, unmarked buffy-salmon belly is the most reliable single field mark at distance—no streaking, no barring, just warm orange-buff. The crown shows three dark horizontal bars separated by pale buff stripes, running perpendicular to the bill axis. The back is an intricate mosaic of gray, brown, and black that functions as near-perfect leaf-litter mimicry.
Females average somewhat heavier than males—about 7.6 ounces versus 6.2 ounces—but are visually identical in the field2. Reliable field sexing requires a bird in hand and reference to bill measurements.
Vocalization: The Peent and the Sky Dance
The American Woodcock has two vocalizations worth knowing, and one that demands a spring evening in a field edge at dusk.
The Peent
The ground call of the displaying male is a loud, nasal, buzzy note—the peent—delivered at roughly five-second intervals from a patch of open ground or forest clearing2. It has no musical quality whatsoever. It sounds like someone pressing a large electronic button with conviction. Hear it once, and you will never misidentify it.
The Flight Song and Wing Twitter
When the male launches skyward into his courtship spiral, three outer primary feathers—narrowed and stiffened through evolutionary modification—produce a mechanical twittering as air passes through them2. This is entirely without vocal effort. On the descent, the bird adds liquid, musical chirping. The combined effect is one of the stranger sounds in the eastern night sky: mechanical twittering rising, musical chirping falling, silence at landing.
Aldo Leopold described this display in his landmark 1949 essay “Sky Dance” in A Sand County Almanac as “a refutation of the theory that the utility of a game bird is to serve as a target, or to pose gracefully on a slice of toast.”2 The sky dance begins as early as February in the southern range and extends through May in the north1.
Behavior and Biology
Foraging: The Boogie Walk and the Prehensile Bill
The woodcock forages by probing moist soil for earthworms, but the probing is preceded by something that looks, frankly, ridiculous: a front-to-back rocking motion while walking, the bird’s weight shifting rhythmically as it moves across the forest floor2. This boogie walk is thought to create soil vibrations that trigger earthworms to move toward the surface—exploiting the earthworm’s defensive response to what resembles a digging predator or heavy rainfall. Whether this is the complete explanation remains open; nevertheless, the behavior is consistent and distinctive enough to have become the woodcock’s most shared wildlife video.
The bill anatomy is genuinely extraordinary. The prehensile tip of the upper mandible opens and closes independently while fully inserted in soil—the bird can seize and extract earthworms underground without withdrawing the bill first1. The lower third of the bill is dense with tactile nerve endings that detect prey movement in the soil. The woodcock does not probe randomly. It reads the ground.
Earthworms constitute the great majority of the diet, supplemented with beetles, millipedes, spiders, and other invertebrates1. Adults require moist, workable soil and become stranded during prolonged hard freezes—one reason early-arriving migrants are vulnerable to late-season cold snaps.
The Sky Dance in Detail
At dusk—and again before dawn, and sometimes through moonlit nights—a displaying male claims an opening in young forest or a forest edge known as a singing ground. He peents from the ground. He peents again. Then launches upward in a wide climbing spiral, wings twittering, ascending to between 200 and 350 feet2. At the apex, the twittering becomes intermittent. He shifts to musical chirping, banks and wheels, zigzags downward, and lands silently. A female may be watching from the nearby cover.
“Yet the coming and going of the birds is more or less a mystery and a surprise,” Burroughs wrote. “We go out in the morning, and no thrush or vireo is to be heard; we go out again, and every tree and grove is musical; yet again, and all is silent.” Quote ID: 1-008 The woodcock embodies this more completely than almost any other species: invisible in leaf litter all day, suddenly the center of the evening sky.
Nesting Cycle
The female selects a nest site—a shallow scrape in leaf litter, typically within 150 yards of a singing ground—and incubates four eggs for 20 to 22 days without assistance from the male2. Chicks are precocial, leaving the nest within hours of hatching. Young woodcock begin probing in soil at three to four days old. The female broods them briefly; they are largely self-sufficient within the first week.
Male woodcock play no role in nest selection, incubation, or chick-rearing. And they can’t take a hint, some continue displaying through May and into June, long after most females have raised their broods1.
Social Structure
The American Woodcock is polygynous and essentially solitary outside the breeding season. Males display at multiple singing grounds and may mate with several females2. Females, for their part, may visit four or more singing grounds before committing to a nest—and, as Colby Slezak’s 2024 research confirmed, may initiate new breeding attempts at entirely different locations during the northward migration itself, sometimes hundreds of miles apart9.
Similar Species: How to Tell Them Apart
| Species | Key Differences from Woodcock | Habitat | Range Overlap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wilson’s Snipe (Gallinago delicata) | Slimmer body; lengthwise bold head stripes (not horizontal bars); white belly with heavily barred flanks; longer proportional bill; longer visible neck and legs | Open marshes, wet meadows — not forest floors | Much larger, fan-tailed, crested, long neck; entirely different profile and gait; drums rather than peents |
| Eurasian Woodcock (Scolopax rusticola) | Roughly double the weight (~12 oz vs. ~6 oz); heavy rufous barring across entire underside; courtship is “roding” — a slow, low, patrolling flight at dusk — not a spiraling sky dance | Old World forests | No range overlap; strictly Old World; useful to show American Woodcock is the only Scolopax native to the New World |
| Ruffed Grouse (Bonasa umbellus) | Identical young aspen habitat across the Upper Midwest and Northeast — frequently flushed in the same Michigan banding covers | Identical young aspen habitat across Upper Midwest and Northeast — frequently flushed in the same Michigan banding covers | Broad North American range; both managed under the Ruffed Grouse Society / American Woodcock Society umbrella |
FAQ: Common Questions About American Woodcock
1. What is the “sky dance” and when and where can I see it?
The sky dance is the male woodcock’s spring courtship display, performed at dusk and dawn from late February through May. Find a field edge, forest clearing, or brushy opening at dusk anywhere in the eastern United States during March or April. Stand still and listen for the buzzy peent call from the ground. Displays intensify on calm, mild evenings above freezing2. When the peenting stops, look up.
2. Why does the woodcock rock and bob when it walks?
This boogie walk — a rhythmic front-to-back rocking motion during foraging — is thought to vibrate the soil in a way that triggers earthworms to rise toward the surface2. Earthworms respond to vibration the way they respond to rain or digging: by moving up. The woodcock may have learned to exploit this reflex. It is one of the more widely shared wildlife behaviors on the internet, and it earns attention.
3. Is the American Woodcock really a shorebird if it lives in the forest?
Technically, yes — it belongs to the family Scolopacidae, which includes sandpipers and snipe. But the woodcock has completely abandoned shoreline habitat and lives its entire life on forest floors, probing for earthworms rather than invertebrates in tidal mud. It is the only member of the genus Scolopax native to the New World, and it has no close relatives on this continent2.
4. How can I tell an American Woodcock from a Wilson’s Snipe?
The cleanest field mark is the belly: the woodcock has a plain, clean buffy-salmon underside; the snipe has a white belly with bold dark barring on the flanks. The woodcock’s crown shows horizontal bars; the snipe’s head has bold lengthwise stripes. And they rarely occupy the same habitat — snipe use open marshes and wet meadows; woodcock prefer dense young forest floors where snipe rarely appear.
5. Why are woodcock populations declining, and is hunting responsible?
The primary driver is forest maturation: brushy young-forest habitat has been disappearing as abandoned farmland grows into middle-aged and mature forest11. Hunting is not the main cause — harvest has fallen roughly 90% since the 1970s while populations continued declining1. Secondary threats include heavy metal contamination through the earthworm diet and habitat loss to development.
6. What habitat do woodcocks need, and how can landowners help?
Woodcock require four overlapping habitat types in proximity: moist young hardwood forest for feeding and brood-rearing (trees under 20 years old with dense shrub layers), open singing grounds for courtship, transitional shrubby cover, and night roost fields with sparse, patchy vegetation1. Landowners with even a few acres can help by creating openings in maturing forest through harvesting or brush management. The Wildlife Management Institute’s timberdoodle.org offers free landowner guidance for all regions of the woodcock’s range.
7. How does the woodcock’s bill work to find earthworms underground?
The prehensile tip of the upper mandible opens and closes independently while fully buried in soil — allowing the bird to grip and extract earthworms without withdrawing the bill1. The lower third of the bill is packed with nerve endings that provide tactile detection of prey movement in the soil. This is not random probing. The woodcock reads the ground like braille.
8. Are woodcocks endangered, and is hunting them still allowed?
The American Woodcock is not federally threatened or endangered. Partners in Flight gives it a Continental Concern Score of 12 out of 20, reflecting ongoing concern but not immediate crisis1. Hunting is permitted across its range, with season dates and bag limits set annually by the USFWS based on Singing Ground Survey data and banding returns from programs like Michigan’s8. The hunter-as-conservationist relationship that defines the Michigan banding program — 38,000+ bands, data shaping federal policy — is not a paradox. It is the species’ most reliable safety net.
Key Takeaways
- Forest Maturation, Not Hunting: Woodcock population decline is driven primarily by the aging-out of early successional forest as abandoned farmland matures — not by hunting pressure, which has fallen approximately 90% since the 1970s1
- The Ammann Protocol: Dr. Andy Ammann’s pointing-dog banding method, developed starting in the 1960s in Michigan’s aspen forests and formalized in his 1981 book, is now the global standard for woodcock research — a technology born from a failed smelt net and decades of patience
- 38,000 and Counting: Michigan has banded more woodcock since 1981 than any other state or province in the world — a dataset that directly shapes federal hunting season regulations across the eastern flyways5
- A Shorebird That Forgot the Shore: The woodcock belongs to the family Scolopacidae but has completely abandoned coastal habitat — the only Scolopax native to the New World, living its entire life on forest floors, reading earthworms through the soil
- Itinerant Breeding: Colby Slezak’s 2024 research confirmed that approximately 80% of female woodcock nest multiple times during spring migration, traveling an average of 500 miles between nest attempts — a rare life-history flexibility previously undocumented in this species9
- The 21.3 Million Acre Problem: Restoring woodcock populations to 1970s levels requires creating 21.3 million acres of young forest across eastern North America — a scale that frames woodcock conservation as full ecosystem restoration, simultaneously benefitting 50+ other declining wildlife species11
- Action: On a calm evening in March or April, find a field edge at dusk anywhere in the eastern United States; stand still; listen for the peent. Then support young-forest habitat initiatives through timberdoodle.org
Bibliography
Modern Scientific Sources
[1] Cornell Lab of Ornithology. (2024). American Woodcock Life History. All About Birds. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/American_Woodcock/lifehistory
[2] Cornell Lab of Ornithology. (2024). American Woodcock Overview. All About Birds. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/American_Woodcock/overview
[3] Seamans, M. E., and R. D. Rau. (2023). American Woodcock Population Status, 2023. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Division of Migratory Bird Management, Patuxent Research Refuge. https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/american-woodcock-population-status-report-2023.pdf
[4] Seamans, M. E., and R. D. Rau. (2018). American Woodcock Population Status, 2018. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Division of Migratory Bird Management. https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/AmericanWoodcockStatusReport18.pdf
[5] Michigan Wildlife Council / Stewart, A. (2017). Banding an Important Tool in Bird Conservation. Detroit News. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/sponsor-story/michigan-wildlife-council/2017/02/25/banding-important-tool-bird-conservation/98329990/
[6] Brockman, M. (2019). Meet the Hunters—and Their Dogs—Who Spend Spring Tracking Woodcock Chicks. Audubon Magazine. https://www.audubon.org/news/meet-hunters-and-their-dogs-who-spend-spring-tracking-woodcock-chicks
[7] OutdoorHub. (2013). Andy Ammann Memorial Woodcock Viewing Area Dedicated in Michigan. OutdoorHub. https://www.outdoorhub.com/news/2013/06/20/andy-ammann-memorial-woodcock-viewing-area-dedicated-in-michigan/
[8] Michigan Department of Natural Resources. (2019). Ruffed Grouse and American Woodcock Status in Michigan, 2019. Michigan DNR Wildlife Division Report No. 3658. https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/dnr/Documents/WLD/Reports/ruffed_grouse_woodcock_status_2019.pdf
[9] U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. (2024). Colby Slezak and the American Woodcock. FWS Scholar Feature. https://www.fws.gov/story/colby-slezak-and-american-woodcock
[10] University of Rhode Island. (2024). URI-Led Team Finds Direct Evidence of ‘Itinerant Breeding’ in East Coast Shorebird Species. URI News. https://www.uri.edu/news/2024/04/uri-led-team-finds-direct-evidence-of-itinerant-breeding-in-east-coast-shorebird-species/
[11] Wildlife Management Institute. (2009). Woodcock Plan Gets Busy. Outdoor News Bulletin, February 2009. https://wildlifemanagement.institute/outdoor-news-bulletin/february-2009/woodcock-plan-gets-busy
[12] Sustainable Forestry Initiative / forests.org. (2012). The Lyme Timber Company and WMI Receive SFI Conservation Research Award. https://forests.org/lymetimbercowmi/
Historical Sources
Return of the Birds: A John Burroughs Wake-Robin Revival (2022) 44from26. (Peter Meddick, editor, 2022), audiobook on Audible.
Quote IN-004: On relating a bird to human life — the live bird versus the labeled specimen. Source
Quote 2-138: Woodcock tracks noted in passing among field observations. Source
Quote 1-002: The spring procession of returning birds, from hardy early arrivals to the brilliant wood-birds of June. Source
Quote 1-008: The mystery and surprise of birds’ arrival and departure — musical one morning, silent the next. Source
Leopold, A. (1949). “Sky Dance” in A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press.