While ruffed grouse often come to bag when you least expect them to, there's more to hunting them than simply walking through the woods waiting for lightning to strike. Successful grouse hunters make their own luck, improving their odds with a keen knowledge of their quarry and its habitat. Good hunters know, too, what tactics to use, how to choose the right gear to help them navigate the grouse's thorny world in relative comfort, what kind of gun to shoot, and how to shoot it.
What follows is a short course in ruffed grouse hunting.
Finding Grouse
Grouse inhabit some of the densest cover of any upland game bird. They are not birds of the deep, parklike woods, but edge dwellers, thriving in the transition zones between forest and field, where enough sunlight reaches the ground to encourage young trees and undergrowth. Here, grouse find food and shelter, and we, plunging through the thickets, find grouse.
What defines good grouse cover? One simple answer might be to walk until you reach a spot where you're glad you wore your brush pants. Once brambles start tugging at your trouser legs you've found grouse food: blackberries, raspberries, wild rose, greenbriar, and a host of other thorny plants. Abandoned orchards, with their windfall apples and clinging grape vines, attract birds as well.
Even more important to grouse are stands of young alders, which grow close enough together to give protection from airborne predators. Alder buds also provide grouse with a high energy food source. Other budding trees they favor include birch, cottonwoods, poplars, and aspens.
Creek bottoms offer both water and edge cover. Cleared fields provide clover and alfalfa, and grouse like the shelter of evergreens when the weather turns cold.
Deep snow banks hold grouse during the winter months as well. Make a note of the food sources and type of cover where the first grouse of the day flushes, then plan your hunt around similar areas or microhabitats, to borrow the jargon of biologists. Some hunters go so far as to slit the crops of grouse they shoot and make a detailed study of the bird's chosen diet for that day.
Tactics
Ruffed grouse, frankly, will test your legs before they challenge your brain. The main hunting tactic is simply to wade into the brush and flail around.
There are, however, a few tricks to grouse hunting that will add birds to your bag.
First, especially if you hunt without a dog, look for grouse on the ground. Grouse prefer cover that is essentially open, at least at ground level, and with a little practice you can learn to spot them. Look for the beak and crest, which present a distinctive silhouette among the leaf litter. Don't forget to glance up from time to time either, as grouse will perch in tree branches during the day while eating buds.
Spotting a bird before it flushes takes away the element of surprise and allows you to move to a position where you'll have a clear shot when the bird takes wing.
If you miss or don't get a shot, follow up the flush. Grouse rarely fly more than 100-150 yards before landing again. Mark one down and you can often find it and flush it again. Eventually, you'll wear the bird out, although it may do you in first if the terrain is steep enough. It's also a pet theory of mine that if you can push any game bird to the edge of its familiar territory through repeated flushes, eventually it will hold tight, not wanting to leave its home range.
Try blocking the exits. Although grouse can't be driven and blocked like pheasants, two or more hunters can team up on grouse nevertheless. If one hunter posts where he has a good view of the likely escape route from a patch of cover while the other dives in with the dogs, the stander may get an easy shot. Similarly, take turns, one of you beating the edge cover, the other walking along in the comparatively open woods, or down a logging road, hoping for an easy shot at a bird flushed by your partner. Obviously you need to wear plenty of orange, be aware of where you partner is at all times, and pass up low shots if you hunt this way.
There's a school of hardcore grouse hunters who go without dogs by choice, believing that the best chances will come at birds who flush at their feet rather than somewhere out there in front of the dog. They rely on their own willingness to bust brush to find grouse, and I won't argue with their results.
In fact, while today I'd stay home rather than hunt without a dog, the truth is I've had good luck in the past flushing grouse by myself. One tactic is to pause frequently, hoping to unnerve nearby birds. Make sure you stop in a spot where you can actually swing your gun. Flushing grouse is only half the battle if you walk up your own birds; getting a clear shot is the tough part.
Grouse Gear
Whether you hunt with or without dogs, you'll flush more birds if you're not afraid to wade through the thickest cover. Good grouse hunting clothes help by functioning as armor, and pants faced with cotton or nylon to ward off brambles are a staple in most grouse hunter's wardrobes.
An alternative I often choose is a pair of briar chaps, which can be slipped over any pants in a second. Mine are made by Orvis and they're lightweight yet virtually bulletproof. For hand protection I like thin deerskin gloves, which are tough yet thin enough to shoot in.
Good polycarbonate shooting glasses will shield your eyes from thorns and twigs. If you choose your lens tint correctly, something in the yellow-orange-vermillion range, you'll also be better able to pick a bird out of the riot of background colors.
As for boots, I'd guess 90 percent of all grouse hunters wear leather topped, rubber bottomed boots, myself included, but any light, comfortable leather boot will work just as well.
Finally, leave the tweed hats and coats to the British and stick with blaze orange caps and vests. Besides the obvious safety advantage of bright colors, it's simple courtesy to wear orange. If your hunting clothes virtually glow in the dark, your hunting partners won't have to waste precious moments looking to see where you are when a grouse takes flight.
Grouse Guns
Gather a dozen hunters and ask them to describe the perfect pheasant gun or dove gun, and likely you'll get 12 different answers after a long and heated argument. Tell them to define "grouse gun," however, and chances are the same group will reach a quick consensus for a short, light, open-choked, small-bore double gun. That prescription is a good one, although it bears some qualifying.
Let's examine each of the traits of our perfect grouse gun in turn.
Weight. Most of the time you're grouse hunting, you'll be looking for grouse, not shooting at them. Your gun should be light enough to carry up and down hills, over deadfalls, through brush, often with one hand while you fight off branches with the other. All the while, of course, you have to be ready to take a quick shot should a bird materialize.
Those conditions argue for a gun as light as is feasible for good shooting, between six and 6-3/4 pounds for most of us. Shooting super-light (lighter than about six pounds) guns well is trickier than many hunters realize; light guns are quick to start but just as quick to stop if you don't follow through, since they lack the weight to keep on swinging by themselves. So, like the shaggy dog of the old joke (who was shaggy, but not that shaggy), our perfect grouse gun has to be light without being too light to shoot well.
Length. Let me buck conventional wisdom and suggest that shortness might be an overrated quality in grouse guns. I proffer this opinion as one who's hit my fair share of tree trunks with gun barrels. Yet it's rarely that extra two or three inches of gun at the muzzle that winds up tangling in the brush.
What little you lose in maneuverability with long barrels you more than make up for with a bit of extra weight out front to help the gun move to and through the target. Barrels of 26-28 inches for double guns or 24-26 inches for pumps and autos is about right for most grouse hunting.
Chokes. Agreed: a grouse gun should have open chokes. Rarely will you take a shot longer than 25 yards. Most of the time you won't even be able to see that far, much less shoot.
A straight cylinder bore is none too open early in the season, although you may wish to swap tubes for IC as the leaves come down. For double guns, the old boring of skeet 1/skeet 2 is just about ideal, and the standard IC/M will do most of the time. With open chokes you'll want small shot to fill out your patterns --7-1/2s or 8s. The 7-1/2s might be the better choice, but if woodcock pass through your grouse coverts, 8s make a fine compromise for both species.
Action. Grouse guns are traditionally double-barreled, in large part because double guns are usually (but not always) lighter and better balanced than repeaters. Double guns are also easier to break open for safety when you're scrambling down banks and across brushpiles, and they don't fling empties all over the landscape, either.
The main advantage of a pump or auto, that third shot, rarely comes into play in grouse hunting. So we'll call our perfect grouse gun a double, although there's nothing wrong with shooting a repeater you like, and I certainly wouldn't feel sorry for myself if required by law to do my grouse hunting with, say, a 20-gauge Auto 5 or a 28-gauge 870.
If you do pick a double as your grouse gun, you'll have to decide between an over-under or a side-by-side. O/Us are so popular as to require no introduction these days, but the side-by-side has tradition going for it, as well as a wide sighting plane that stands out readily against the cluttered background of typical grouse cover.
If you're used to the narrow sighting plane of repeaters and O/Us, you might find shouldering a side-by-side to be a revelation. The effect is like looking down the middle of a two-lane highway and the first impression is, how could you possibly miss with a gun like this one?
Gauge. Small bores? Why not. 16s, 20s, even 28s are all gun enough for grouse, who will usually expire on receipt of just two or three small pellets. There's no reason, however, not to take advantage of the 12-gauge's superior ballistics if you can find one light enough to carry into the grouse woods. While most 12s weigh too much to meet our grouse gun definition, there are some great lightweight models around.
Two guns born and discontinued far ahead of their time--Winchester's fiberglass-barreled Model 59 autoloader and Browning's Twentyweight Double Auto--are worth haunting gun shows for. Franchi's 48/AL autoloader makes a good choice, weighing just 6-1/2 pounds in 12-gauge. Browning's Superlight Citori O/U tips the scales at 6 pounds, 10 ounces, and Beretta's new Essential O/U weighs about the same. All of these would make fine grouse guns, as would any number of small-bore guns too numerous to list here.
Our ideal grouse shooter, then, is a skeet or IC choked pump, auto, or double of any gauge from 12 to 28, weighing somewhere over six and under seven pounds, with barrels of modest, but not abbreviated length.
More important than any specs is that the gun fit its owner and inspire confidence when you snap it quickly to your shoulder. Chances at grouse come unexpectedly and never often enough. When a grouse does flush in range, there's usually a twig in your eye, a vine around your leg, and a screen of branches between you and the bird. The best course is to ignore the brush, swing fast and hope.
Failing that, look for an opening in the bird's path and try to cut him off at the pass. Every once in a while, the miracle occurs and a grouse falls, just often enough to keep you coming back to the October woods again and again.
Copyright (c) 1996 Philip Bourjaily. All rights reserved.
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