A Grouse Hunter’s Almanac: The Other Kind of Hunting

Grouse Weather

177 Grouse Weather Every once in a while, I happen across surprising numbers of grouse massed together in just a few brief acres. A couple of years ago on a cold November Saturday, my dog went on point in a small grassy depression carved out of the thousands of acres of surrounding popple and balsam fir. The clearing was less than an acre. It was a cold morning, frost still riming the long grass, and a weak sun had yet to melt it off. I moved in front of the dog, and the bird got up and flushed into the clearing, presenting a relatively easy shot. We moved four more birds in that small depression, maybe fifty yards in circumference, all hunkered down in the grass, surprising them in their warm beds. To the west there were more grassy depressions , little kettles encircled by heavy woods, so we moved on and hunted them. Sure enough, we found birds in the next little savanna, all tucked in, holding tight, refusing to leave their snug quarters. After hunting that second depression, we had enough grouse for the day, but we pressed on to check more of these grassy openings and 178 test my hunch that they would hold birds. Grouse flushed from nearly every one, for once presenting relatively easy shots, and when the morning ended, we had moved well over two dozen birds holed up in the grass, protecting themselves from a cold November day. The following September, on an unseasonably cold morning, I hunted those same depressions again, thinking we would encounter like numbers. This time we didn’t move a single grouse. The birds were up in the popples on the ridges or down in the tag alders along the creeks, just about everywhere except where we had surprised them the previous November. And rightly so—it was a somewhat warmer day, and the grouse were out foraging, not hunkered down in thick cover conserving body heat. Article after article has been written about locating grouse by examining their crops and locating those food sources. And we do find grouse near their food, but weather may affect their habits, and habitations , just as much, maybe more. Slowly over the years, through my experiences and by talking with other hunters, I’ve come to realize that weather more so than diet plays the crucial role in finding birds. A few writers have discussed the effects of weather on ruffed grouse, most notably George Bird Evans. He wrote in The Upland Shooting Life that weather, more than food or cover, affects grouse shooting. Weather (cold hands, a wet trigger) affects the hunter’s competence. Weather influences the location of birds, how they act, and a hunter’s chances of locating them. Evans felt weather affected scent, “the most critical factor of dog work.” In this classic text Evans devotes ten pages (as many as he writes about diet) to weather and the role it plays in grouse hunting. Late Season 179 In most areas across North America where ruffed grouse live, the weather can change from summerlike on opening weekend to bitterly cold at the season’s end—a phenomenon Evans recognized. Where I hunt in north-central Wisconsin, the ambient temperatures can swing well over 100 degrees in the course of the season, from a balmy 80 in mid-September to a brutal minus 25 or lower in January. Sun, wind, rain, heat, drought, sleet, snow, frost—grouse and grouse hunters experience it all. The warm, windy days of the early season offer perhaps the most difficult hunting conditions of the entire season. The northern woods seem junglelike, home to hordes of mosquitoes and scads of deer and wood ticks, but it’s the lush green leaves screening the birds that really affect shooting. Plus in dry years grouse can hear dog and man coming a long way off, the brittle leaves and twigs on the forest floor crunching underfoot. For whatever reason, grouse seem especially skittish on windy days when the leaves are off the trees. Some hunters believe this is because they can’t hear the approach of predators . Couple wind with dry leaves, and a grouse hunter might be lucky just to get a fleeting glimpse of a bird on a breezy, dry fall day. Warm and dry air also creates scenting problems for dogs, the scent dissipating more readily in the thinner...