It's a strange little creature with big eyes and a bill that looks too long for its body. Most active at dusk, night and dawn, a woodcock uses its bill to probe rich soil for earthworms, its favorite food.
Woodcock are migratory.
While a few birds from farther north may wait out an exceptionally mild winter on Pennsylvania's southern fringe, most timberdoodles pass through our state. In spring, woodcock return north. Taxonomically, the species is placed in Order Charadriiformes , which includes gulls, oystercatchers, plovers, stilts, curlews, sandpipers, snipe, phalaropes and others. Within this large order, the woodcock belongs to Family Scolopacidae , a group of snipe and sandpipers with more than 80 species distributed over most of the world. The Old World bird resembles its American counterpart and has a similar life history, but it's larger and almost twice as heavy.