Rural: A shot in the dark for the woodcock

The numbers of one of our more flamboyant yet mysterious birds are swelled by migrants this season. Duff Hart-Davis writes in praise of the woodcock.

This is the time of year when shooting men hope to come across that elusive and unpredictable rarity - the woodcock. You can go out and find a pheasant or a pigeon any day, but a woodcock is something else - a bird whose magic derives from its very evanescence.

The most fascinating thing about woodcocks is the way they silently come and go: one day there are none in a wood, and the next you may find several. Most country people reckon they are migrants, and associate their arrival in England with the onset of harsh weather in the far north of Europe; it is well established that ice and snow drive the birds southwards in search of warmer climes, and that during their nocturnal journeys some are forced down by exhaustion, short of their ideal destination. This explains why they are sometimes found in apparently uncongenial surroundings, such as the middle of a field of kale. A few old boys still speak of a "fall" of woodcocks, meaning that some have dropped in out of the sky during the night. I treasure the story of the Norfolk squire who, early this century, departed for a winter season at his club in London, leaving his gamekeeper George with instructions to inform him when the woodcocks arrived. In due course he received a letter which read, in its entirety:

Horned Sir

The kaks becum

Jarge

No doubt the squire hastened home - for when the woodcocks are in, they add enormously to the excitement of the day. From boyhood in the Chilterns I remember old Harry Brown, the keeper, letting out a tremendous roar of "WOODcock!" every time one was sighted.

They jump up with a clap of wings from under a bush, and, considering their rather heavy build, like a jumbo snipe, jink their way through the trees with astonishingly swift and frequent changes of direction.

They are hard to find and difficult to shoot, but they are delicious to eat, tasting like a pheasant that might have been lurking in a marsh: the slight fishy tang doubtless derives from their habit of feeding on earthworms.

Even if winter does swell the population with migrants, some woodcocks remain in Britain all year round, and their breeding habits are unique in several ways. On late spring evenings a male will launch into the form of display known as roding, during which he patrols his territory with long, circular flights just over the trees.

Back and forth through the dusk he goes, not dodging about as he would in the wood, but flying straight and fast, with heavy, owl-like wing-beats, sometimes in an oblong loop which may be half a mile from end to end, sometimes in a huge figure of eight. All the time he is turning his head from side to side and uttering two quite different calls: one a single, high-pitched squeak, the other a guttural urk, urk.

His mate, meanwhile, is nesting on the ground, often at the foot of a tree. If she has chosen a bed of beech leaves as a site, her wonderful camouflage - marbling of dark brown, light brown and black - makes her almost impossible to pick out. It is said that during daylight she slowly rotates on the nest so as to keep her head away from the sun and prevent her eyes giving off any tell-tale glint that might betray her presence. Certainly woodcocks' eyes are enormous, and set very high on the sides of the head - so high, in fact, that biologists believe the birds can see not only all round them, but over the tops of their heads as well, without moving.

Rotation on a nest is something I have never witnessed. What I have seen is another peculiar habit often dismissed as a fairy tale: a mother carrying a chick between her thighs. One summer afternoon, as I walked quietly along a woodland ride, a woodcock burst out of the undergrowth a few feet away, and I saw at once that there was something odd about her. In flight she looked abnormally upright and elongated, so heavy that she could barely clear the brambles. Staring, I realised that she had a fluffy baby clamped between her knees. Having plopped it down on a new site some 20 yards off, she made two return trips to collect the second and third of her brood.

Migration to Britain, however, remains the most curious facet of woodcock behaviour. It makes perfect sense that the birds should head south for Portugal, Spain, northern Greece and Turkey, to escape the northern winter; but why should they risk a transit of the North Sea when they could travel more safely, and in easy stages, overland? (Experts assume that if strong south-westerly winds blow up, thousands must drown.)

A recent, fascinating suggestion is that the birds are still following the migratory routes pioneered by their ancestors millennia ago, before the North Sea existed, from the time when Britain was still part of mainland Europe. Ringing has shown that latter-day woodcocks return to their wintering and breeding grounds with astonishing fidelity - so perhaps our latter- day visitors steer by age-old instincts, without realising that a potentially lethal expanse of sea lies ahead of them.

A story is told of the late Sir Charles Clore - less knowledgeable about country matters than the Norfolk squire - who used to hold grand pheasant shoots at Stype, his estate in Gloucestershire. One day, when he saw that the bag included a woodcock, he boomed at his gamekeeper, "I like them! We'll rear a thousand of them next year."

His enthusiasm was entirely misplaced. The whole point about woodcocks is that they cannot be reared artificially, like pheasants or partridges. They cannot be corralled or decoyed. On the contrary, they go their own mysterious way, and so retain their magic.