Urban woodcocks in winter are not necessarily there by chance - I've seen a couple on urban brownfield sites which were anything but exhausted. A few years ago I opened a gate on a small abandoned industrial yard in Newcastle and disturbed a woodcock which had clearly been resting there in daytime; last year on an old dock site by the Clyde in Glasgow I was surprised to see an overflying woodcock in daytime, presumably disturbed from a site elsewhere on the river. A lot of these sites are closed off to the public and there is consequently very little human disturbance, but don't have a lot of tree cover which you'd normally associate with woodcock habitat.
The other strange thing about woodcock was the number I noticed at the edge of rural roads in the severe winters of 2010-11, mostly at night - I wondered at the time if this was a consequence of water shortage, coming to puddles formed by the action of de-icing salt, or whether it was the high salt content itself which was attracting them.
