Rare Footage Shows Woodcock Hens Fending Off an Unlikely Nest Intruder: Deer

Again in 2025, wildlife biologist Kylie Brunette was going by footage from digital camera traps she’d positioned in entrance of woodcock nests within the forests of West Virginia when one thing surprising caught her consideration: a fearless feminine woodcock defending her nest from a deer. “It was undoubtedly a shock,” she remembers. “I used to be excited as a result of it was utterly sudden.”

However then the surprises stored coming.

Whereas analyzing the footage, Brunette, who works on the College of Maine, and her analysis staff stored discovering completely different events by which the ground-nesting birds defended their nests from white-tailed deer utilizing numerous methods, from merely puffing as much as launching full-on assaults. The movies are the primary recognized proof of the birds defending their nests in opposition to deer, the researchers reported in a paper published in June within the journal Ecology.

Well-known for his or her quirky seems and dance-like movements, American Woodcocks have a number of ways for protecting predators away from their nests, together with faking a broken wing to lure intruders in one other route. However they aren’t recognized for being large fighters, Brunette notes, and truly have a fame for being fast to desert nests. “They’ve actually excessive re-nesting potential, and so typically it makes extra sense for them to simply depart and defend themselves,” she says. “It was actually cool to see a number of hens determine that perhaps a deer wasn’t as large of a risk and that they may drive it off.”

Though deer have been recognized to feed on chook eggs and doubtlessly even nestlings, it’s an “extraordinarily uncommon” conduct, says Eric Michel, an ungulate ecologist at Mississippi State College. Within the spring, chook eggs, that are excessive in calcium and different vitamins, could be most helpful for male deer rising their antlers and females which might be both pregnant or lactating—all energy-demanding processes. Nevertheless, just a few research have even documented deer predation on chook nests, so many questions stay on the precise mechanisms round it, says Michel. 

The footage Brunette and her staff collected was initially supposed to assist gauge woodcock nesting success on former mine websites that had been reclaimed. Between 2024 and 2025, the staff deployed distant cameras filming 25 particular person nests, usually positioned on the forest edge, in each reclaimed areas and pure forests. White-tailed deer had been captured 73 instances throughout the cameras’ 10,000 hours of footage, coming near 68 % of all monitored nests. For essentially the most half, the woodcocks simply stayed nonetheless, counting on their camouflage. However on six events, when the deer got here too near the nests, the hens reacted.

It’s “nearly unimaginable to say” whether or not the deer supposed to prey on the nests, had been merely curious, or inadvertently got here too shut, says Michel. Not one of the footage confirmed a deer consuming the eggs or the nestlings. In the course of the six interactions, the moms confirmed a wide range of defensive methods, seeming to rely on how a lot of a risk the deer posed. “I believe there’s one thing occurring of their tiny little woodcock brains that evaluates the state of affairs and says ‘low risk’ versus ‘excessive risk,’ after which they reply to that,” Brunette says.

In a single occasion, a deer got here near unknowingly stepping on a nest with an incubating hen when she shortly hyped up, scaring the deer away. In one other clip, a woodcock—which Brunette calls the “all-star champion hen”— took a extra aggressive strategy when the deer got here shut sufficient to smell her. She flew straight at its face, and because the deer approached the nest a second time, she stored attacking whereas additionally vocalizing and fluffing her physique feathers to intimidate the deer.

Whereas woodcock populations have been declining because the Sixties, the decreases are principally resulting from habitat loss, with deer predation seemingly taking part in an insignificant position given how uncommon the conduct seems to be, Michel says. “On the fee that it’s at the moment occurring, I don’t assume it’s a problem by way of really negatively impacting chook populations,” he says.

Brunette agrees that predation might be a uncommon prevalence, as proven by the truth that they didn’t doc any on this case, however she additionally believes that “it may very well be a priority as deer populations are increasing and as they’re being launched to locations that they weren’t beforehand,” she says. “They may have an effect on chook species in the event that they’re predating nests at a excessive degree or in the event that they be taught that nests are a supply of protein.”

In any case, the findings present that woodcocks could be extra resilient in opposition to the bizarre predators than anticipated. “I hesitate to go so far as like, ‘Oh yeah, woodcocks might be tremendous in opposition to deer,’” Brunette says. “However I do assume that it’s a good signal. We didn’t anticipate woodcocks to have the ability to defend their nest in any respect in opposition to a deer, and so that’s actually cool.”