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Michigan american woodcock hunting report

Last updated 2026-09-24 · from MDNR data · 2025–26 licence year

American woodcock season is shut in Michigan and this app's copy of the 2025–26 licence year holds no further opening date. The best of the season is October. The bird is a stronghold in Michigan.

Season status

Today
Shut
Season
September 15, 2025 to October 29, 2025 — 45 days afield
Bag
3 per day, 9 in possession

Computed against the day this page was built, from MDNR's dates. This page carries no weather and no bird count: this app holds neither a hunting-weather model nor a population survey for american woodcock, and a report that invented either would be worse than one that says so.

September in the cover

Local birds through September, then the flight birds down on the first hard cold front — usually the middle of October.

Wet alder runs, damp aspen bottoms and shrub swamp — soft ground the bird can probe for worms. Woodcock cover is often two hundred yards of a creek bottom rather than a whole block of forest.

Where the bird is

Both a breeding bird and a flight bird here. Michigan holds some of the densest singing-ground counts in the country, and then the northern birds pour through on top of them in October.

Open this map in the app
Stronghold Regular Present Occasional No records The 10 units in the table below
49 of 59 subbasins draining Michigan carry a american woodcock record. Observed occurrences, not a range map and not a habitat model. Scored as a share of all bird records in the same cell, so a well-watched county does not read as better bird country than an unwatched one. The mesh is the subbasin — the unit this app scores in — and not the state line, so its edge is a drainage divide rather than a border. The green is the 10 public units in the table below, drawn as PAD-US records their boundaries: context, not permission.

The other questions

By region

Open the hunting map →Public land and bird cover, drawn for the bird you are after.