Woodcock Watch Blog

The woodcock breeding season will now be well underway. Male woodcock will be roding all across the country and most females will be incubating. Some females will already have chicks, especially given the relatively mild start to the spring. Normally, by mid-April, we are busy with spring fieldwork but under current coronavirus restrictions, none of our usual work can continue.

Nellie III has made a welcome return to the Woodcock Watch map with a series of new transmissions.

Our tagged birds are doing something woodcock very rarely do – behaving as expected! Several of our tagged birds have departed over the Easter weekend and some are making very good progress.

With our tagged birds having left the UK behind several weeks ago it would now seem an ideal time to take a quick look at the journeys they’ve made.

Read our letter, published in The Times today and written by Andrew Hoodless, our Head of Wetlands Research