This month Palmetto State hunters can bushwhack wily woodcock whether they have dogs or not.
A hunter finally works his way through a briar tangle, only to have his feet mire to the ankles or wedge between the gnarled knees of an ancient cypress.
At the precise moment he is trying to extract his feet and unravel his shotgun from the greenbrier web, a twittering bird takes flight, dodging between saplings and showing an orange streak along the trailing edges of its wings.
By the time the hunter mounts his unfired shotgun, the bird drops to the forest floor, mere yards away. To the observant hunter who knows his upland game birds, the hunt for this particular woodcock is not yet over.
“A woodcock might give you several chances to shoot if you watch where he sets down,” said Basil Watts, a 57-year-old retired Cape Fear River pilot who hunts woodcock in coastal swamps.
He hunted with pointing dogs a few years ago, but he now has the time to hunt for so much other game he simply includes woodcock hunting incidental to other hunting trips.
“The place we hunt has a woodcock singing ground, and birds would show up there in the winter,” he said. “When I first hunted them, it was incidental to quail hunting. But once I found the singing ground where they concentrated every year, I began hunting woodcock on purpose.
“They feed in a low place in that swamp. But I’ve also seen them do their mating flight. The male spirals way up in the air, singing that song, then just plummets, spreading his wings before he hits the ground. The mating flight happens at dusk, but they continue flying all night.”
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