When Conditions Are Right, Woodcock Can Be Fun and Easy

Of all the birds that fly south in the fall, none is more mysterious than the gentle brown woodcock. Descended from shorebirds, adapted to the forest, long-beaked eaters of worms, night-fliers, woodcocks arrive en masse on a bold north wind and leave en masse with the next one.

"All the conditions are right today," said Steve del Rossi last week. "It went from warm weather to cold with strong winds over the weekend. It should be good."

So it was. From the moment we set foot in the tangled woods of southern New Jersey with his fine Brittany spaniel, Kailie, and Bob Poole's aging warrior, Bart, woodcock erupted from the briers and brush like little rockets.

The action didn't quit till we strode back out six hours later, having flushed 28 birds and bagged six, the legal limit of three apiece.

Del Rossi, a professional dog trainer and seasonal woodcock guide, doesn't carry a gun. He handles the dogs and, when one goes on point in particularly rough terrain, drops to hands and knees to forge into the thickest tangles to flush a bird for his patrons. At least he did for us. "I don't crawl for everybody," he said.

Poole, my woodcock-crazed friend from McLean, and del Rossi have traveled the highways from Canada to Louisiana chasing woodcock for years. Both sport treasured bumper stickers from Chandler Woodcock's unsuccessful 2006 campaign in Maine. "Woodcock for Governor," it proclaims on their trucks.

On many forays they see just a few birds, some days none at all. Then there are times like last week, when the woods are full to bursting with woodcock, fresh from the north on the wings of a sharp wind.

For information about woodcock hunting and Brittany spaniels, call del Rossi's Quail Hollow Kennels in Salem, N.J., at 856-935-3459 or check the Web site http://www.quailhollowkennel.com.

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"If you have something to do tomorrow, you probably won't die today," says Bill Burton, dean of outdoors writers in our region, who at 82 is still cheerfully plugging away. He took to the Chesapeake via wheelchair last week with hopes of cashing in on the fall rockfish bonanza he regularly writes about in his column in the Annapolis Capital.

Burton's best fishing buddy is Ed Darwin, skipper of the Becky D, a slow, wooden charter boat Darwin has been running out of Mill Creek in Annapolis for decades. He knows every fish-rich hump and dropoff on the bay floor from Baltimore Light to Poplar Island, a stretch of 25 miles or so that circumscribes the Becky D's range.

But when the wind blows and the water temperature plummets, it's hard to tell where the fish may be. It took two hours of prospecting from the Bay Bridge south past the mouth of the Severn River last week before Darwin hit the mother lode -- a pile of plump rockfish mauling schools of bait near the mouth of the South River.