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Back in 2025, wildlife biologist Kylie Brunette was going through footage from camera traps she’d placed in front of woodcock nests in the forests of West Virginia when something shocking caught her attention: a fearless female woodcock defending her nest from a deer. “It was definitely a surprise,” she recalls. “I was excited because it was completely unexpected.”

But then the surprises kept coming.

While examining the footage, Brunette, who works at the University of Maine, and her research team kept discovering different occasions in which the ground-nesting birds defended their nests from white-tailed deer using various strategies, from simply puffing up to launching full-on attacks. The videos are the first known evidence of the birds protecting their nests against deer, the researchers reported in a paper in the journal Ecology.

Famous for their quirky looks and dance-like movements, American Woodcocks have several tactics for keeping predators away from their nests, including faking a broken wing to lure intruders in another direction. But they aren’t known for being big fighters, Brunette notes, and actually have a reputation for being quick to abandon nests. “They have really high re-nesting potential, and so sometimes it makes more sense for them to just leave and protect themselves,” she says. “It was really cool to see multiple hens decide that maybe a deer wasn’t as big of a threat and that they could drive it off.”

Although deer have been known to feed on bird eggs and potentially even nestlings, it’s an “extremely rare” behavior, says Eric Michel, an ungulate ecologist at Mississippi State University. In the spring, bird eggs, which are high in calcium and other nutrients, might be most useful for male deer growing their antlers and females that are either pregnant or lactating—all energy-demanding processes. However, only a few studies have even documented deer predation on bird nests, so many questions remain on the exact mechanisms around it, says Michel. 
 

The footage Brunette and her team collected was originally intended to help gauge woodcock nesting success on former mine sites that had been reclaimed. Between 2024 and 2025, the team deployed remote cameras filming 25 individual nests, often placed on the forest edge, in both reclaimed areas and natural forests. White-tailed deer were captured 73 times across the cameras' 10,000 hours of footage, coming close to 68 percent of all monitored nests. For the most part, the woodcocks just stayed still, relying on their camouflage. But on six occasions, when the deer came too close to the nests, the hens reacted.

It’s “almost impossible to say” whether the deer intended to prey on the nests, were merely curious, or inadvertently came too close, says Michel. None of the footage showed a deer eating the eggs or the nestlings. During the six interactions, the mothers showed a variety of defensive strategies, seeming to depend on how much of a threat the deer posed. “I think there’s something going on in their tiny little woodcock brains that evaluates the situation and says ‘low threat’ versus ‘high threat,’ and then they respond to that,” Brunette says.

In one instance, a deer came close to unknowingly stepping on a nest with an incubating hen when she quickly puffed up, scaring the deer away. In another clip, a woodcock—which Brunette calls the “all-star champion hen”— took a more aggressive approach when the deer came close enough to sniff her. She flew straight at its face, and as the deer approached the nest a second time, she kept attacking while also vocalizing and fluffing her body feathers to intimidate the deer.

While woodcock populations have been declining since the 1960s, the decreases are mostly due to habitat loss, with deer predation likely playing an insignificant role given how rare the behavior appears to be, Michel says. “At the rate that it’s currently occurring, I don’t think it’s an issue in terms of actually negatively impacting bird populations,” he says.

Brunette agrees that predation is probably a rare occurrence, as shown by the fact that they didn’t document any in this case, but she also believes that “it could be a concern as deer populations are increasing and as they’re being introduced to places that they weren’t previously,” she says. “They might have an impact on bird species if they’re predating nests at a high level or if they learn that nests are a source of protein.”

In any case, the findings show that woodcocks might be more resilient against the unusual predators than expected. “I hesitate to go as far as like, ‘Oh yeah, woodcocks will be fine against deer,’” Brunette says. “But I do think that it is a good sign. We didn’t expect woodcocks to be able to defend their nest at all against a deer, and so that is really cool.”