How we can help nurture our wonderful woodcock

Woodcock have a reputation of being unpredictable in their movements, here today and gone tomorrow.

So you could be forgiven for feeling that whether or not you shoot them makes little difference to numbers in the long-term. To the Victorian sportsman, a ‘fall’ was not to be missed. If the keeper found some, he would rush to tell the boss and invitations to shoot tomorrow would be sent out in a hurry.

The first clues that this story of randomness might not be quite right came surprisingly early. I remember reading an account of an odd-coloured bird trapped by an early Victorian gamekeeper on the Gower Peninsula in South Wales and taken to his boss.

In an early example of bird ringing, the boss put a band of metal around the bird’s leg