This spring, hundreds of volunteers across the UK donned their headtorches and insect-repellent to take part in our national census of breeding woodcock. Each entrusted with a specially selected woodland site to survey, their count data provide a valuable health-check for the UK’s breeding population. This periodic survey has been conducted every ten years since 2003, and the newest iteration will provide an opportunity to see how populations have changed since 2013.
If you were among our surveyors last year, please ensure that you log-in to your BTO account and submit any outstanding count data AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. We can only use your data if it returned to us! This is important regardless of whether you saw woodcock or not. One of the survey’s aims is to assess woodcock distribution and it is just as valuable to know where woodcock were not seen.
Finally, a big thank you to all those who volunteered, without which this survey would be impossible. The response to the survey in 2023 has been fantastic! Over 1600 survey sites were allocated to volunteers, and we have received data from 1200 of these already, making it the biggest and most-comprehensive census of our resident woodcock population to date.