Everything Old Is New Again: Hunting Woodcock in Words

It is that sweet time of year again, when fields, woods and marshes of every kind and stripe beckon us to get off our duffs and make a beeline for the uplands.

- By Bob DeMott

Come October, that's been my routine for more than 65 years: rabbits and varying hare with beagles back in the day; then a long stint on wood ducks and mallards with retrivers; and now grouse and woodcock with setters. In looking over my field journals, I realize that pursuit of one bird in particular in the past half-century has been a defining habit: I have hunted woodcock north of 800 times, and my dogs have had more than 4,000 contacts with individual birds (two or three times that many if re-points and re-flushes had been counted). Gene Hill's comment in The Whispering Wings of Autumn (1981) sums up my life, too: "I spend an irrational amount of time and thought messing around with woodcock," he said, "woodcock this and woodcock that.

As part of the messing around, for the past several years I have indulged in an oddball pursuit that has become an intellectual side hustle, so to speak, of my lifelong upland fascination and an accompaniment to fifty-plus years of hunting woodcock. My inner nimrod met its match in my inner geek. In between dashes to the woods with my setters, I have been studying in a scholarly way the history of literary and artistic writing about American woodcock, from the first significant account in 1709 to the current day, an impressive span of 315 years. The result, Flight Birds, 90,000-words long, is an annotated record of mostly nonscientific titles written in the United States about our native woodcock (