As a general perspective for migrating birds, the birds that are resident or have been in the area for a few days are the ones with lots of fat on them. Flight birds that have newly dropped in are usually depleted of fat content.

In my bird banding studies at migration stations, we see all types of birds drop in overnight and they are typically in poor condition with no fat. They'll stay for a day or two and build up fat reserves and the move on.

We've all seen flights of ducks and geese. Has anyone ever seen what they would call a woodcock flight?

Just arrived home from hunting camp in Vt.
Last weekend we had 9 woodcock flushes in a vert short period of time on Saturday - like less than an hour and a half. Sunday we had two woodcock flushes all day.
Yesterday we had 1 and today none. I think we missed the good flights we have sporadically experienced in past years. Of course limiting ourselves to just weekends we shouldn’t expect much better.

Woodcock are where (and when) you find ‘em.





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Dean am going to Maine in a few minutes , about as far north as you go in Vermont. Will report back tonight. Oct. 21 was great, all immature birds, hope to find a few more but who knows.

They migrate solo, so no flocks or groups. The flights are usually as high as the tallest tree.

its a fall of woodcock - if you want the old classic old timer's term

even though Rick is correct- we now know that they travel as individuals

I've experienced what I would term a "Fall" of woodcock twice. Once in central MN after a frigid blast of northerly air we were walking through a new cut that had grown to whips about waist high. We were headed to grouse cover on the other side, but started flushing woodcock. In the span of about a half hour, we flushed over 30 birds according to my records. Some were reflushes, but there were a gracious plenty of birds in that small covert.

The second one occurred back in the 1990s. We had a Halloween snow storm that brought about 6 inches of snow to us (Northern Missouri). We went out the next day, the first day of our quail season, to hunt quail. We were hunting a friend's farm, mostly open, but with a small "ditch" (as we call them in Missouri). We ran into many nearly frozen woodcock. Once we saw their condition, we left them alone. They were reluctant to flush and could barely move. It was sad to see.

They mostly probably survived okay after they regained some rest and the strength to move on.

Is seems almost every other late February after some unseasonable warm south winds for several days and early woodcock have moved in a 8 or ten- inch snow hits us and it almost always tails off in heavy rain and sub-freezing temps puts a thick crust on the snow. We have found dozens of dead woodcock for the next couple of weeks, all starved because they couldn’t find their customary food sources.






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Here's a link to an interesting series of maps of individually GPS-tagged woodcock and their migration from mid to late October through the eastern part of the U.S.A.

https://www.woodcockmigration.org/migration.html

Interesting that individual birds would all choose to land/rest/eat in the same piece of land.