Don’t get my wrong, woodcock hold a special place in my heart. After all they were the first gamebird I hunted successfully with a dog and a single shot 20 gauge in my late grade school years. Those hunts in my youth mostly took place on Sundays. Which ment we were back at the truck by noon so my dad could listen to the Vikings game on the radio and we could drive the backroads looking for roosters.

There are times when the woodcock flight is in and I have my limit and I want to move onto ruffed grouse or pheasants. But the dogs insist on finding every single woodcock in the cover. Even after redirecting them into likely grouse or pheasant cover they know they can find birds back in the woodcock hellholes that will hold tight for their points. This is when woodcock move down a notch or two on my preferred birds to hunt and I would prefer a flushing breed over a pointing breed.

There is an invisible line in Minnesota that splits the prairie from the forest. This is where in late October it is easy to take a limit of woodcock and possible to find a limit of roosters. It’s seems that the forest is ever encroaching along this line and islands of aspen pop up in prairies of bluestem and other grasses. That is where woodcock love to be.

The strategy is the same as when out in the west looking for combination limits of pheasants and sharp-tails. It doesn’t pay to concentrate on one species over the other. As it is common to find both in the over lapping cover.

The first pic is of the cover likely to hold both woodcock and pheasants. The second is of a combo limit I took with my shorthair Charlie that includes a bonus ruffed grouse. Grouse and snipe are common bonus birds by the way.