The Living World - Woodcock

In this week's Living World, Miranda Krestovnikoff tracks down one of our most mysterious and elusive birds, the woodcock. This mysterious wader spends most of its life in woodland and is wonderfully patterned to blend in with dead leaves. In summer there are about 160, 000 woodcocks in the UK, but in winter their numbers are swelled to over a million by migrant birds from Scandinavia and Russia. With their long bills, woodcock probe for worms and when the soil freezes, birds are forced to move south to the British Isles.

Woodcock are nocturnal , hiding by day in dense woodland. To see one, Miranda enlists the expertise of Dr Andrew Hoodless, a woodcock biologist with the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust who's been studying the birds for 20 years to find out where they feed, how they're affected by hard weather and what type of woodlands they require in the breeding season.