Pennsylvania Game News - March 2011 - 18

At www.timberdoodle.org you can find links to the American Woodcock Conservation Plan: A Summary of and Recommendations for Woodcock Conservation in North America. You can also download American Woodcock Habitat: Best Management Practices for the Central Appalachian Mountains Region, a 26-page booklet explaining how best to manage land for woodcock and other young-forest wildlife.

upslope through progressively drier soils, letting woodcock shift up and down the moisture gradient during damp or droughty periods. Some demonstration areas are large, such as the privately owned Clermont Tract, some 25,000 productive wooded acres in southern McKean and northern Elk counties. There, shrubs and quick-growing trees have been planted on old fire-caused savannah-like openings — an effort that will yield hundreds of acres of new woodcock habitat to supplement the young forest continually being renewed by commercial logging in neighboring hardwood stands. (Work at both Clermont and Bald Eagle State Park has been supported by Pennsylvania’s Wildlife for Everyone Foundation and Woodcock Limited of Pennsylvania.) Other demonstration areas have been set up or are in the works at Lake Raystown (Huntingdon County); Polk Wetlands (SGL 39, Venango County); Montour Preserve (Montour County); the Barron Tract (Somerset County); Nescopeck State Park (Luzerne County); Swatara Gap State Park (Lebanon and Schuylkill counties); SGL 252 (Lycoming and Union counties); and Maurice K. Goddard State Park and adjoining SGL 270 (Mercer

County). For descriptions of those and other demonstration areas, go to the website www.timberdoodle.org. This website also presents detailed information on woodcock habitat, natural history, behavior and population status. And it explains the different regional habitat initiatives currently underway across the woodcock’s range. The best tracts in the effort to restore woodcock numbers likely will be large ones, in the hundreds and even thousands of acres. But smaller parcels, including ones owned by private individuals and land trusts, can also provide important habitat, either by creating a habitat type unavailable in a given area or by linking to neighboring parcels. A landowner with as few as five to 10 acres can make a difference. In Columbia County, Chris Young has seen that difference — and heard it each spring, as woodcock males peent and fly on his property. While making woodcock habitat, he has simultaneously improved his own rabbit hunting opportunities. “I really enjoy creating wildlife habitat,” he says. “At any time of the year, I can go into those brushy areas and sit for most of a day. I’ll spend my time watching the birds and the rabbits.” This wildlife now thrives thanks to a landowner whose curiosity was piqued by the odd, repetitive calling of a long-billed bird on an evening during the spring.

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Pennsylvania Game News - March 2011

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