By Dave Hurteau
Ruffed grouse hunting grew up in 19th century New England, so naturally it can be a bit of a prude. So genteel in certain circles, so neatly wrapped in tradition and style, it must seem to some hunters—especially new and/or young ones—the domain of fuddy-duddies and dandies.
Don’t believe it. (I, for one, am too ill-bred to be a fuddy-duddy and way too badly dressed to be a dandy.) The truth is, getting into grouse is easy and anything but exclusive. All you really need is a reliable shotgun and a pair of reliable legs. You don’t need tweeds, or an English-made double, or even a bird dog. Just grab your gun and go…and you’ll find the fastest, funnest, most wonderfully frustrating shotgunning in the uplands.
How to Find Ruffed Grouse
There are grouse hunters who would rather share the same strand of dental floss with you than their best grouse cover. Good habitat is the secret. You just won’t find many birds in marginal habitat. On the other hand, anyone can flush grouse in good habitat. So, it’s a good idea to find some.
Ruffed grouse prefer the early-successional forest cover associated with abandoned farmland, regenerating clear-cuts, burns, strip-mines, and the like. This includes the classic covers that grouse hunters dream of: abandoned apple orchards and old pastures overrun by birch and bramble, shimmering aspen groves and dank alder runs, stone walls and cedar fences. But grouse live here (and in less-idyllic places) for unromantic reasons. Knowing of few of them can help you pin down the best haunts.
Locate the Best Grouse Foods
One of the most limiting factors to good grouse habitat is the availability of winter food. Fall is a feast: Apples, clover, wild strawberry, wild grape, cherry, dogwood, thornapple, mountain ash, and greenbrier are just a few favorites–and well worth the hunter’s attention. But for most grouse (except in parts of the southeast where they continue to feed on the ground), winter brings a strict diet of buds and catkins. Mostly, aspens.
It’s no fluke that the range of our most widely distributed tree closely mirrors that of our most widely distributed nonmigratory gamebird. Aspens are grouse magnets, primarily because the buds and catkins of male quaking aspen and bigtooth aspen (also known as popple or poplar) provide the majority of grouse with their single most important winter and early spring food source.
So keep your eye on the aspens: their white trunks gleam in the fall sun, and their yellow leaves shake and shimmer, like so many tiny hands waving you in the right direction.
Where aspens are scarce or absent, important winter foods include the buds and catkins of apple, alder, birch, black cottonwood, cherry, ironwood, willow, and cedar.
Locate the Best Grouse Cover
Whether it’s a dense grove of wrist-thick aspens, a thornapple thicket, or a stand of young conifers, grouse need thick stuff to thwart avian predators, their biggest threat. If while hunting a given area you do not at least occasionally think, Why do I torture myself walking through this stuff? you may in the wrong place.
Adult grouse are full-time residents of small home ranges (typically between 10 and 40 acres), within which they must meet all their needs. Consequently, every good grouse cover, without exception, is a place where different habitat characteristics mingle: edges.
Look for the obvious edges associated with streams, logging roads, fields, and tree groves of different species and ages. But look also for subtle edges: where a small cluster of pines, even a pair of apple trees, or a single blowdown breaks up the dominant cover. And look especially for multiple edges. Good covers always have a few isolated hotspots, and these are invariably places where several edges meet.
How to Flush Ruffed Grouse ... Read the full Field and Stream article to learn more
