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North Carolina american woodcock hunting report

Last updated 2026-09-24 · from NCWRC data · 2026–27 season year

American woodcock season is shut in North Carolina today. It opens December 10, 2026 — 77 days away. The bird is well established in North Carolina.

Season status

Today
Shut
Next opening
December 10, 2026
Season
December 10, 2026 to January 30, 2027 — 52 days afield
Bag
3 per day, 9 in possession

Computed against the day this page was built, from NCWRC'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

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

Statewide on passage and near the southern end of the Atlantic flyway, which is why the season does not open until December — the birds arrive on hard cold fronts, not on the calendar.

Open this map in the app
Stronghold Regular Present Occasional No records The 10 units in the table below 2 units too small to draw
37 of 46 subbasins draining North Carolina 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.

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