The woodcocks are a group of eight very similar living species of sandpipers in the genus Scolopax. The genus name is Latin for a snipe or woodcock, and until around 1800 was used to refer to a variety of waders. The English name is first recorded in about 1050. According to the Harleian Miscellany, a group of woodcocks is called a "fall".

Taxonomy

The genus Scolopax was introduced in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. The genus name is Latin for a snipe or woodcock.

Only two woodcocks are widespread, the others being local island endemics. Most are found in the Northern Hemisphere but a few range into the Greater Sundas, Wallacea and New Guinea. The closest relative of the woodcocks is the jack snipe (Lymnocryptes minimus), with this genus pair then to the two other snipe genera Gallinago and Coenocorypha. As with many other sandpiper genera, the lineages that led to Gallinago and Scolopax likely diverged around the Eocene, some 55.8–33.9 million years ago, although the genus Scolopax is only known from the late Pliocene onwards.

Woodcock species are known to undergo rapid speciation in island chains, with the extant examples being the Amami woodcock in the Ryukyu Islands and the several species of woodcock in the Indonesian islands, the Philippines, and New Guinea. Subfossil evidence indicates the presence of another radiation of woodcock species in the Greater Antilles; these Caribbean woodcocks may have been more closely related to the Old World woodcock species than the New World ones, and were likely wiped out by human incursion into the region.

Species

The genus contains eight species: Unlike in most birds, the tip of the bill's upper mandible is flexible.

The cocker spaniel dog breed is named after the bird: the dogs were originally bred to hunt the woodcock. <!-- McKelvie (1993)? -->

References

  • Arthur Cleveland Bent. Life Histories of Familiar North American Birds: American Woodcock (Scolopax minor). Published in 1927: Smithsonian Institution United States National Museum Bulletin 142 (Part 1): 61–78.