Upland Focus: ACRE BY ACRE, HOPE GROWS FOR ONE OF NEW JERSEY'S LAST WILD GAME BIRDS

Every day on the southern tip of New Jersey, a stream of trucks and cars lines up for passage on the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, which has been carting passengers across the Delaware Bay since the 1960s. Cape May has also been a rendezvous point for American woodcock since long before there was a ferry — or a city — at the spot.

- Andrew Sharp

The Hydro-Ax leaves freshly cut terrain behind to allow for the growth of the next generation of woodcock habitat in New Jersey. (Photo/Mark Dreyfus)

“When woodcock are coming south, they sort of bunch up before they cross the Delaware,” says Ben Larson, a forest conservation director for the Ruffed Grouse Society and American Woodcock Society.

New Jersey’s human population is thriving, but its woodcock population, as elsewhere, has been trending in the other direction. A recently formed chapter of the American Woodcock Society is doing what it can to keep timberdoodles hunting for earthworms throughout New Jersey’s forests for generations to come.

Their challenge: New Jersey has lost more early successional forest than any other state in the region, Larson says, and adds, “Diversifying habitats in New Jersey is really, really key.”

Chapter board member Ralph Di lorio marks an area before the state cuts it to create woodcock habitat. (Photo/Mark Dreyfus)

That’s because as hundreds of thousands of acres of young forest habitat that woodcock crave have disappeared, the Garden State has seen a corresponding decline in the number of these robust little fliers.

The American Woodcock Conservation Plan, developed through the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies and released in 2008, remains a rich source of information about woodcock habitat. It noted that in conservation Region 30 alone, which cuts across the southern part of New Jersey and includes its coastal areas, about 778,000 acres of small-diameter forest provided habitat from the 1960s to the 1980s. That number had fallen to about 139,000 acres by 2008. In the region, the prevalence of seedlings and saplings — young forest habitat — dropped from more than 60% to a little over 10%.