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. 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. 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.