An American woodcock tries to wait out the snow from an April storm at Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge. Prolonged spring snow cover can negatively affect adult survival and nest success (Photo by Matthew Vander Haegan).

Modified shorebird traps are used to capture all age and sex cohorts of woodcock at Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge, Maine (Moosehorn NWR file photo).

Moosehorn NWR biologist Andy Weik removes an American woodcock from a mist net during capture and banding activities on the refuge in Maine in May 2007 (photo by Lindsay Seward, Univ. of Maine).

The hoop of a long-handled capture net is about to come down on this American woodcock roosting in a blueberry field at Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge, Maine during summer of 2007. Woodcock use fields and new clear cuts for night roosting; on dark, rainy nights they may be caught with judicious use of a spot light and net (Moosehorn NWR file photo).

During spring, summer and early fall Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge staff capture and band American woodcock to assess productivity, survival, and relative habitat quality.  During 2007 we captured 99 different woodcock and banded 85 new woodcock by night-lighting (12), mist nets (34 spring, 8 summer), and ground traps (29); these results are about half of what is normally expected. From the woodcock singing surveys conducted in April and May, we knew the breeding population had dropped sharply, which was expected as a result of prolonged snow cover on their local breeding grounds this April.  The age ratio of juvenile woodcock to adult female birds from summer banding this year was 1.1 young per adult female, indicating very poor productivity in 2007.  To put this in perspective, an adult female woodcock normally lays a clutch of 4 eggs.  We suspect some individuals may have forgone nesting completely this year.  Additionally, we noticed that the hatch was later then usual, indicating a delayed nest initiation and/or early nest failure and subsequent renesting.  In fact, we determined that one young brood captured in July had hatched July 3^rd, approximately two months later than most broods typically hatch on this study area, and close to a refuge record late hatch (and this is Moosehorn's 70^th year!). Based on refuge data, we expect it will take a few years free of catastrophic weather events for the local woodcock population to return to the level that existed prior to the April snows of 2007. Woodcock were not the only species affected by this year's April snows -- bald eagles nesting at Moosehorn and elsewhere along the coastal belt in Maine similarly experienced substantial nest failure.