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.
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"Doubtless the good Lord could have made a better game bird than bobwhite, and better country to hunt him in...but equally doubtless, he never did." -- Guy de la Valdene (from A Handful of Feathers )
"'I promise you,' he said, 'on my word of honor, I won't die on the opening of the bird season.'" -- Robert Ruark (from The Old Man and the Boy)
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