This book brings together eight of Britain’s finest artists to celebrate what is probably the most popular of all gamebirds, the woodcock.

It is also, according to Rodger McPhail, the bird that presents the greatest challenge to a painter. Well, the artists here have risen magnificently to the challenge. Each has written about his own experience of the bird but it is the pictures which make this book spellbinding. From delicate pencil drawings to glowing oils and bold bronzes, each page offers a fresh delight – quickening the heart of everyone who has ever brushed through the russet leaves of autumn, or crunched the rimed winter rushes beneath their boots, and started at the sudden flurry of a flushed woodcock.