UMaine leads international team to study, conserve woodcock

The American woodcock is a well known shorebird found across eastern North America. Each year, they migrate from overwintering locations in the southeastern U.S. to breeding locations across the northeastern and midwestern U.S. and southeastern Canada.

To gather data on the woodcock’s migration, a team led by faculty at the University of Maine has collaborated with 15 different state natural resource agencies, federal agencies in the U.S. and Canada, a number of conservation nonprofits and two other universities.

The Eastern Woodcock Migration Research Cooperative was co-founded by UMaine avian experts Erik Blomberg and Amber Roth, both faculty at UMaine’s Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Conservation Biology, which Blomberg chairs. Roth also holds an appointment in UMaine’s School of Forest Resources.

Researchers use GPS trackers affixed to the birds to study their movement throughout the year. Widespread collaboration has generated a dataset with nearly 700 individual woodcock tracked by GPS. Through their migrations, these birds have flown to nearly the full extent of the species’ range in North America, through 32 states and seven Canadian provinces.

Graduate and undergraduate UMaine students used data from the project, which is supported by the Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station through the College of Earth, Life, and Health Sciences, for various studies. A former postdoctoral fellow with the project, Sara Clements, evaluated migration strategies and published her findings in the journal Ornithology. Alexander Fish, who completed his Ph.D. in 2021, compared the timing of woodcock migration with the annual hunting seasons for the species and published his research in the Journal of Wildlife Management.

Read the full story on the UMaine Research website. 

Contact: Daniel Timmermann; daniel.timmermann@maine.edu