Early Season

 

     It always starts with much anticipation, maybe even more so than Christmas. The leaves are still on and a few trees are still quite green. Temperatures might be up into the mid-sixties or higher, much too hot for the dogs and the hunters too, but off into the woods we will go.

     With luck, family broods of ruffed grouse will be found. Some of those young birds might even be dumb enough to fly into a load of number eight shot that is tearing through the air. A naive young bird will sit in a tree, not knowing how lucky he is that we choose not to shoot birds off limbs. We often taste a wild apple and probably toss it away as too bitter.

     The foliage usually is spectacular, from reds to yellows to oranges and green. We get hot and tired too soon. Up in our country the dogs can usually find a brook to stretch out in. A woodcock might tweeter away or a grouse thunders away. We’ll seek a shady spot up on a hill where a breeze might find us.

     Sometimes a bird comes home with us and sometimes none do, but it’s always a hell of a good time.

Late September

Fall colors are happening.

      We wait all year for October. Time slows almost to a standstill as the end of September grows closer. On cool days we run the dogs, hoping to get them and ourselves into shape. The woods is still a jungle of leaves. Birds are bumped, some are pointed, and most disappear before anyone could ever shoot them.

      This week was a good one. Grouse were found on a couple of morning walks and the leaves are starting to put on quite a colorful display. As the week ended the weather turned a bit warm, but we managed to get out while it was still cool. 

      The dog's bells and orange collars were dug out a couple of weeks ago. The waxed cotton clothes may get a re-wax, depending on their wear. Hunting knives are located and touched up on a stone. Boots will be treated with waterproofing. Clean shotguns are cleaned again and lovingly oiled. Preparation can be half the fun.

      Hunting journals jog memories of long forgotten coverts. Topographical maps and aerial images are studied. Friends call who haven’t called in a year. Nobody is more popular in October than someone who owns a home in grouse country.

      It is only eight days until the season opens.

Young of the year sitting in a tree.

Mentoring

      There are not as many people hunting as there used to be. Nationwide the number of hunting licenses has been on the decline for years. If we don’t maintain our numbers we lose our political clout. You know where that can lead.

      The state of New Hampshire has put together a program where willing hunters can mentor someone that would like to learn bird hunting. It is a unique opportunity to do something useful, maybe make a new friend or two, and spend a day in the woods. How bad can that be?

       If you are interested in participating contact Tom Flynn at Thomas.flynn@wildlife.nh.gov . It will be fun and you’ll feel good about yourself.

The king of game birds.

Winter

The stream icing up.

     Cold grips the land. On the hillsides over two feet of snow blankets the ground. Nighttime temperatures dip into negative numbers, sometimes with double negative digits. It snows often, sometimes light flurries that last for days and accumulate little.

     The chickadees, juncos, and blue jays are constantly at the feeders. When the hairy woodpeckers dart in they look enormous. This year both red and white breasted nuthatches visit us. Occasionally a female cardinal stops by, but her visits are rare and the male even more so.

     Squirrels are a nuisance and we try to discourage them. Our dogs thrill at chasing them away and we set have-a-heart traps in the hopes of relocating them. So far we have only caught the nocturnal flying squirrels. Our big fear is the squirrels chewing into the house and setting up home over the soffits, which happens all too often up in this neck of the woods. I’m not above using the old Winchester 410 to knock them out of the trees. The dogs love that.

     A walk down to the stream requires snowshoes. The snow isn’t as deep there and the dogs can run through the woods. I worry about finding deer yarding up in the shelter of the fir trees, but so far it hasn’t happened. To stress out wintering deer is something I do not want to do.

Grouse tracks

     Snowshoe hare tracks are all over the place. Coyotes cross the stream on an ice bridge. Deer have passed through, but all the tracks are old. Sometimes we see where the beaver has dragged brush, but not this year.

     Occasionally we see grouse tracks or droppings beneath favored trees. The dogs always show interest. Sometimes a grouse will roar out from up high in a tree, but more often they remain hidden and watch. To flee unnecessarily burns too many precious calories.  

Our youngster Maggie.

     Camp Grouse always feels particularly cozy when the temperatures drop and the snow gets deep. Looking at the big pile of firewood brings a good feeling and the woodstove is glowing. Winter is a time for drawing in and savoring the place we live.

Blowdowns

    The number of ruffed grouse was way up this past fall and the bird hunting the best in years. What’s different?

     There are many reasons, probably much of it had to do with a warm dry spring. The young broods prospered.  Many of the grouse found this past fall were in clusters, with sometimes a half dozen or more bursting into the air one right after the other. Talk about an adrenaline rush.

Colby pointing a bird.

     One thing that I haven’t heard mentioned, which has to have made a difference, is the number of blowdowns. A year ago this past October a storm passed through our area and knocked down thousands of trees scattered all over the countryside. Some broke off, but more where uprooted. Fir trees made up the majority of them and there is no better cover for a grouse than a dead fir tree lying on its side.

     So many times this past fall our dogs pointed grouse hiding in the shelter of a blown down fir tree. On one of the last hunts of the season a friend’s setter locked up on a horizontal fir and as the owner approached a bird flushed out the back. Almost immediately another shot right back at him and over his head.

     The grouse might not have been always been under the trees, but they were often nearby. One day, hunting up high next to a clear cut, a fat old fir tree that had blown down caught my eye. On the way over to investigate it, my youngest wirehair locked up on point in waist-high weeds. Three grouse exploded into the wide open space with two zipping right past my head and offering no shot.

     

Colby bringing it home.

When a dog points a bird hidden under a large blowdown you can almost guarantee it will flush out the backside and offer no shot. There is an old saying that a lone hunter will find more birds, but two hunters will kill more than twice as many birds. Send your buddy around the far side.

     Did the abundance of knocked down fir trees make a difference in the number of birds this past fall? I think so.

Late Fall

     It has been a great bird season for you, with two limits of ruffed grouse and plenty of excellent dog work. The real world called you home the end of the second week of October, but now you are back in the woods and the leaves are long gone. Things couldn’t be better.

     You hunt this same piece of cover that you did a little over two weeks ago when you found a dozen grouse. Today, with an inch of new snow on the ground and the weeds bent over, the forest seems to be shades of gray. Where are the grouse? What happened? Where did they all go?

     The ruffed grouse have moved. It happens every year. The edges of that clearcut, up high on the hill, where you found so many birds early in October now feel empty. For three hours you have walked and not found a single ruffed grouse…not even a track in the newly fallen snow. Your dog, Banjo, is working her butt off and is as enthusiastic as when you left your truck, but you don’t feel that way.

     You encounter a stream and follow it downhill to where it slips through a culvert beneath a logging road. Still, not a single bird. Crossing the road, you continue down the hill to where the hardwood stand peters out to mix with softwood trees. Banjo’s tail is a blur until she locks up on point.

     As you approach, a grouse steps off a small knoll and disappears down the hill deep into a darkness of the softwood trees, almost like a sky diver stepping out of an airplane. The precipitous drop-off discourages any attempt to follow, but seeing a single grouse has lifted your spirits. You turn to the left to follow the edge where the softwoods and hardwoods mingle, heading back towards your truck.

     Green ferns still poke up through the new snow.  In places a ground cover with roundish palm-sized green leaves shows through the white. A bird flushes from a little over head-high from a fir tree, startling both you and Banjo.

     And it brings a smile to your face.

     In a tight little valley someone has cut a couple of acres of hardwoods trees that abut a stand of hemlock. Alders cluster in a wet area. Poplar and maple sprouts are everywhere. Raspberry vines tug at your pants.

     Banjo goes on point, but before you can walk in front of her a grouse rockets up from the ground and another blasts out of a tree. With a prayer you swing on the one coming out of the tree and see it fold, not even aware that you pulled the trigger.

     Later, back at the truck, you will clean that bird and find its crop filled with buds, catkins from alders, and a few flecks of green foliage.

     The grouse had moved. With the cold weather coming they sought out the shelter of the softwood trees. The seeds and berries that they ate earlier in the fall, up higher on the hill, are gone. Catkins and buds will be their winter diet. When green ground-covers are available they will eat those too.

     It happens every year. As the colder weather settles in, ruffed grouse seek the shelter of the softwood trees. Look along the edge of a softwood swamp. The alders and birches supply plenty to eat with safety nearby. Pockets of dense softwoods around recent cuttings can be good too.

     The birds are there, you just have to work for them. Isn’t that what grouse hunting is all about.

Shot Size

           If you want an endless discussion, maybe even an argument, bring up the subject of shot size at grouse camp. Should the conversation start to slow, ask what everyone recommends for choke constriction.

As a young hunter, I was impressed by horsepower, and that meant high brass loads with number six shot for grouse. My first shotgun, an old Ithaca side-by-side was choked modified and full. Luckily for the grouse, I seldom hit them, but if I did there wasn’t a lot left. One of the first ones I ever shot was also shot by my brother at the exact same instant. We picked up the pieces without either of us realizing the other had shot too. Cleaning what remained of the bird later, there was both my number six and his seven and a half shot in the shredded carcass.

Number six shot is overkill for grouse, even late in the season when their feathers have toughened up. Number eights are my choice through the first two months of the season, and maybe I’ll switch to seven and a halfs later when the birds toughen up in December.

There’s a lot more pellets in a load of number eights than seven and a halfs, about 17% more, and grouse are not difficult to kill. With more pellets a few are bound to find their way through those early season leaves. And if a woodcock is put up you want a lot of pellets in the air or the bird may escape through a hole in the pattern. Some early season hunters like number 9 shot for woodcock, which has about 40% more pellets than a same weight load of number eights.

It is always a good idea to pattern your shotgun to see what different loads do. The first few weeks of the season, when the leaves are still thick and the shots close, spreader loads like Double-Wide by Polywad and Spreader-Lite by RST may increase your bag. On opening day, I like a Double-Wide in the right barrel and a regular seven-eighths ounce load in the left of my twenty gauge, both in number eight shot.

All through the season I shoot open chokes, preferably cylinder in one barrel and improved cylinder or skeet in the other. Most grouse shooting is a close in game. At the tail end of the season, when the leaves are off and the birds are wily, I may put a modified choke tube in my second barrel. It may be time to switch to number seven and a half shot too, because they seem to sustain their energy a little further in the cold denser air.

So I’m willing to listen to your opinions, as we sit by the fire and sip a single malt. The dogs snooze at our feet and there will be more laughter than arguing. If the answers were absolute, it wouldn’t be as much fun.

The fireplace at Camp Grouse.

It’s Showtime

The clearcut

     The season opened on a Monday with light rain, so I spent the morning working indoors. The precipitation stopped early and by mid day things had dried out some. 

     After lunch I took Maggie and Colby up a local bumpy road to take a right next to an old log cabin. We hunted the clearcut on the low side of the road where we had found birds a week before, but found nothing. We did find a moose scrape with a huge track in it. Above the road Maggie pointed one woodcock in a tangle as thick as a steel wool. It escaped unscathed.

The fall colors.

      From there we drove over across the valley to hunt the top of another clearcut. It's an interesting one, at the edge of old farm country, so there are a few apple trees remaining. Maggie pointed a couple of grouse in a thicket that I could not get into before they flew. Colby was on the scent of another, when it burst from a tree over my right shoulder. I killed it with a long shot, using a Polywad Double-Wide load of number eights. 

     Maggie was the one to find the bird. She is very proud of herself.

The first bird of the season. Its crop was filled with apple.

August

Hot weather and humidity, it is not a favorite time of the year. Outside chores are grueling and the dogs spend their days in cool holes dug beneath the deck. Grasshoppers and crickets ratchet their hot weather songs, sometimes unbelievably loud. Haze turns distant hillsides a bluish gray. Thunderstorms that promise short periods of cooler temperatures slip by to the north or south and never fulfill their possibilities.

Trips to the lakes cool us off and the dogs enjoy retrieving from the cold water. Early mornings are the time to get things done. By noontime it is best to hide in the shade or slip back up to the lakes. Ice cream beckons. We try to remember our plight is nowhere near as bad as for those living further to the south.

But the spring was dry and the weather favorable for broods of grouse, so life is good. Without looking for grouse we find them along the roads and they explode next to hiking trails on early morning walks. Friends ask about the upcoming grouse season and I answer, “Optimistic.”

But I do that every year.

Time…

This is from my journal, seven years ago...

My oldest German wirehair, Chara, was ten this summer.  When I stroke her whiskers back I notice cloudiness in her eyes that wasn’t there before.  Her spirit is still strong, maybe stronger than mine, but she is quite content to curl up on a rug and wait for something to happen.  Yet on walks she still hunts for mice and points song birds for her own entertainment, and physically she is still strong.    With the excitement of a pup, she runs for the back door at the sound of the bell on her hunting collar.  Chara’s colors are white and liver, so the new white hairs aren’t as noticeable as if she were darker, but I do see white flecks where solid liver used to be.  Age catches us all.

Pointing as a pup.

          Inside her head are ten seasons of experience, starting with her first season when she pointed quail at five months of age.  I don’t remember if she retrieved them, but I killed several quail over her points that first fall.  The following season we hunted woodcock and ruffed grouse, and I can remember every detail of her first wild bird, a woodcock shot in Randolph, New Hampshire, at the end of a very long day afield.

So many days in a duck blind.

          I remember her first duck hunt and how she retrieved a mallard as if she’d done it a hundred times before.  And the first pheasant she pointed, in a field of low cut grass, where I was so convinced that she was false pointing that I never even raised my gun when the big squawking cock finally flew.

          Last season was her best ever, pointing grouse after grouse, almost never bumping a bird.  Certain days stick in my mind and I hope they always will.  Pointing side by side with our younger dog, she never looked better.  With tremendous luck I killed the first partridge of the season, on opening day, while the two dogs pointed shoulder to shoulder.  The retrieve was a bit contentious and they each somehow ended up with a wing, but remembering it makes me smile. 

          So I have to wonder how much longer Chara will hunt.  This season looks like a sure thing, which is good because the bird numbers are up.  Our two year old German wirehaired pointer, Colby, learns much hunting with Chara and hopefully will continue to absorb the older dog’s wisdom.  At times Chara appears impatient with the younger dog, but more often seems oblivious to the youngster’s presence.  Colby honors easily, almost never interrupting one of Chara’s points, obviously respecting the older dog’s rank.  TA few times last season Colby pointed partridge on her own, along with dozens of woodcock, none of which I’m not sure would have happened without Chara’s example.

          Now Chara dreams on the rug by my feet.  I see her feet twitch and hear muffled barks or chirps, and sometimes even a low growl.  I wonder if she recalls the same events I do, and, if so, what her favorite memories are. 

          Chara will remain top dog until the day she is done, and I plan to make certain she knows it.  We have a long history together.

Chara lived on to hunt fifteen seasons, what a time we had.    

         

Forever in the grouse woods.

 

Old and New

     We live about as far north as the early farmers ever tried to work the earth, at least in New England. Most left not long after they started and there never were a lot of them, but occasionally an abandoned foundation or old stone wall is stumbled upon.

     In 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora exploded in the Dutch East Indies and set off a global weather anomaly that caused the summer of 1816 to be known as The Year Without a Summer. That June it snowed six inches in many parts of northern New England and it didn’t melt for a week. The event convinced many that farming this far north was impossible.

An apple tree gone wild.

     So the abandoned farms are few and far between. We find them occasionally, usually with a few apple trees nearby and maybe a stone wall or foundation. The bears do a number on the apple trees sometimes, but those old trees are tenacious and wild ones abound. Abandoned fields in the forest are called openings by the locals, and every year the openings grow smaller and rarer. High bush cranberries, poplars, and blueberries creep in, soon followed by spruce and fir trees. Those left-behind openings can have some excellent grouse hunting around the edges.

     Up here, the more common grouse habitat is logged over country that is rebounding. Usually an area will provide good grouse hunting a few years after it is cut, until the trees are twenty years old or so and starting to mature. Throw in a few softwood trees for shelter and a stream, so the grouse can pick at washed up gravel, and that cutting is going to hold grouse.

     So up here we study Google Earth and tramp all over the place looking for grouse around these cuttings. I like to follow the edges, particularly if poplar and maple are growing and softwoods are close by. For reasons that I have never figured out, if choke cherry is the predominate specie coming up there seldom are grouse. High bush cranberry, blueberries, raspberries, and mountain ash are a bonus.

     Imagine my surprise when the edge of a clear cut led into a stand of wild apple trees, some of them thirty feet tall, with spruce and fir trees, red twig dogwood, and young maples mixed in. It certainly looked like an abandoned orchard. Some areas even had patches of grass remaining. The nearest paved road was seven or eight miles away, and the nearest gravel road half that.

My old girl Chara on a grouse.

     And there were grouse, lots of them, and even a pair of woodcock.

     A wide circle through the apples brought me back to the edge of the clear cut where stones shrouded in moss had been arranged to make a small foundation and a rock wall hid beneath leaves and lichens. Kicking fallen leaves around produced a rusty barrel hoop, but nothing more. Maybe someday I will go poke around again.

All that remains of a homestead.

     I am sure others have found that covert where new cover sits next to old, but I’m not likely to share it with many. It is a rare gem indeed.

Across The Stream

     Across the stream the cover looked perfect. Isn’t that always the way? Mixed hardwoods towered over clumps of alders and softwoods stood in clusters, all on flat and relatively dry ground. Up in our neck of the woods, if you are not going uphill you are most likely headed down. Horizontal country is rare. And everywhere your feet seem to get wet.

      Ferns and grasses covered that oasis, with patches of wild hops, seedy weeds, or raspberries breaking up the forest floor. To an old bird hunter, it looked like the Garden of Eden.

     For years I had looked at it, across a rather formidable stream. It was property open to the public to hunt, but road access was for the privileged few or on foot around locked gates. Or across that unfordable stream.

     The past summer was as wet as any other up in this neck of the woods, but the last two or three weeks had been dry. Evidently the spring runoff had moved the stream's bottom around and changed the course of the stream a bit. Passing by the other day, I was surprised to notice a place to cross.

     After parking, we started to our collect gear and ready the gun. Instantly, the two dogs locked up on point about fifteen feet from the back of the truck. Ahead of them a nearly vertical drop fell to the water a dozen or more feet below.

     Stepping toward them with gun in hand, a grouse exploded across toward the far side. I never even attempted to bring the gun up. The youngest wirehair, Maggie, launched and landed mid-stream and I don’t think she even knew she got wet.

     The climb down to the stream was a challenge, followed by a leap to a gravel bar, then steps from rock to rock to rock, then another leap to a steep slippery muddy bank, all the while holding onto a very dear shotgun.

     The country looked even better up close.

A scraggy old tree.

No chainsaw had visited that plateau in decades. Three men together would not have been able to put their arms around one particularly fat yellow birch. Ancient alders lined the streambank and scraggy old cherry trees towered overhead. Fat white birches shed sheets of bark and an occasional red maple stood nearby. Further inland, scattered clumps of softwoods offered shelter and a zigzag of alders split the property.

     followed the stream edge, ducking under or stepping over alders. At times we took the easier way, weaving inland to push through weeds or dried grasses. A finger of slack water finally cut off our course.

     The rumble of the stream competed with the rattle of the leaves. Moose and deer tracks hid between the dried leaves in the soft moist ground. Dog bells jingled and it felt like civilization had to be far far away. Overhead, ravens rasped about something.

Hunting inland we followed another line of alders that wove back along an old crooked stream that had barely any water in it. In places wet ground called for careful foot placement to avoid disaster. Twice grouse launched off of the ground, startling us. One flushed low at my feet when I stepped last a cherry tree. It offered an easy going away shot, but the dog’s bells were ringing ahead of the grouse so I held the shot.

     The dogs pointed a woodcock under big old alders, but then the youngster, Maggie, attempted to catch it. Another was bumped, which was nobody’s fault, we’ll blame the wind. We followed to where it disappeared into a cluster of red twig dogwood that stood beside a dark stand of softwood trees, but never found it again.

Colby has been around long enough to know the tricks.

     Colby, the older wirehair, locked up on third one back at the alders. Maggie honored like a champ. That bird came home with us.

     I had to wonder when that land had been logged. Everywhere up in that neck of the woods had been cut over at least once. Could they have just taken the spruce or pine? An area I had logged as a young pup had been harvested that way. The big old yellow birches we passed had to be two hundred years old.

     In a clump of fir trees, Maggie poked around the base of one maple that stood among them, repeatedly coming back to its trunk. Her tail was just a blur. Finally, she looked up, which caused me to look up too, and sure enough a grouse sat hidden among the branches. I am sure the bird wished it were somewhere else, or that we were. Several pictures were taken and then the bird bolted, escaping unscathed without a shot fired

Do you see him in there?

     The string of alders led us through more beautiful cover, but we found no other birds. Eventually we came back to the stream, far upstream from where we had started. We hunted further upstream a bit, but the country turned to mostly softwoods and didn’t look as promising. We turned back downstream to find where we had crossed earlier.

      Crossing back was just as challenging, but we made it with dry feet. And climbing up the banking to the road was the most physically demanding part of the day.

     Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side of the stream, you just have to get there.

New Country

     

        It was a few years back, I had been thinking about it since the previous year, when I drove by the gate and noticed a partridge in the road about a hundred yards away.  We were miles from anywhere on logging roads that day, so I pulled over, let out the dogs, and grabbed my gun to see if the dogs might point that bird.  

        It had taken some doing to just find it, the little guy walked farther than I thought it might.  Chara, my older wirehair, pointed staunchly, I walked in, and then the bird burst into a thicket of softwood trees never to be seen again.

      That road went on around a long bend to the left, apparently following the edge of softwoods growing in a boggy area.  On the other side of the road was a cutting, probably ten years old, maybe younger, gently sloping uphill.  It was late in the day, the last day of our week-long hunting trip, so we didn’t go far, but I knew there was country to explore.

      Often during the next summer I studied the area on Google Earth, looking for softwoods, streams, and fitting the topography into the cuttings.  Frequently I would measure distances to get everything in prospective, trying to plan hunts that would explore the most productive looking country.  Finally, fall arrived.

      I parked in an abandoned logging yard not far up that road and let the two wirehairs and the young shorthair out.  Three dogs?  I love pandemonium.  Light rain fell and the temperature wasn’t much over freezing.  Wherever the ground appeared flat, water puddled from the almost steady rain of the previous week.  But it was the first day of my annual hunting week and life couldn’t have been better.

      We worked the edges of the softwoods and mixed cover, working the high side of the logging road and heading up further into the forest.  No birds.  A couple of miles or so from the truck, and starting to get quite wet, I convinced my girls to hunt the low side of the road back toward the truck.

Well down the slope and far from the road, Chara, the older wirehair, started to get birdy among a mixed stand of mature fir and red maples.  A woodcock bolted up the hill.

          We followed, hoping to find that woodcock again, and soon Chara’s tail started to blur as she sorted out the scents.  Colby, the younger wire, picked up the scent too, while Georgia, the young shorthair, dashed about further down the hill, unaware what the other two dogs were up to. 

Chara at her best. 

          Chara froze.  It didn’t look like partridge country, not on a rainy day anyway, with tall maples and yellow birch trees, so I thought she must be marking the woodcock we had flushed before.  I did my best to hurry over the squishy ground.  Colby noticed Chara and stopped in her tracks.  You got to love that dog.

          A partridge rocketed into the air and flew diagonally up the hill, gaining altitude all the way, launching far ahead of the dog and well out of range.

          By that time water had found its way into various inner parts of my clothing and my legs ached from trying to find footing on the lumpy water-logged ground.  We hunted back up toward the road, with its easier walking, and headed toward the truck. 

          It certainly was rugged country and we would be back.  

More New Country

So close yet so far...

     Across the river looked to be mighty birdy country, but the water was too deep to wade, so to get there meant many miles on logging roads. Mature alders, with pockets of poplar and clusters of softwoods, beckoned. Dozens of times I had seen it, but traipsing all over the country on the other side of the river, I had never figured out where to find it.

     Studying topographical maps and aerial photos, I finally unraveled it.

Beavers were everywhere.

     It took a hike through softwoods to get there, probably a mile. In places the sphagnum moss was so thick you could actually hear yourself think. Most of the spruce and fir trees were large, so the walking was easy, but in places thickets of smaller trees or cedars and water under foot made the going slower. When we could, we followed game trails. I wish deer were taller.

     Along the river ancient cherries stood over the alders. Dead elms desperately tried to hang onto their limbs and scattered fat fallen fir trees required detours. Fingers of water forced reconnoitering and alternate courses. But it was bird country.

     The dogs tore through the cover. Maggie, the youngster, shot about like a ping pong ball, almost immediately bumping a grouse. It looked like a cannon-fired turkey crossing an opening over tall grass. Colby, the experienced older girl, work methodically. Bells were ringing. Birds were pointed, birds were bumped, and, at the end of the day, the birds were luckier than we were.

Do you see him there?

     There’s more country to explore along that section of the river. We’ll be back.

Getting Ready

     It is time to get ready for bird season. The young woodcock and grouse of the year are old enough to fly, so we have been running the dogs in the woods with their bells on. Maggie, our youngest, is showing her smarts and acting like a champion. The older girl, Colby, still likes to show off and finds her share of birds, but her older joints have slowed her down some. It brings great joy to see them pointing side by side.

     It is important to get the dogs in shape, and us too. One of the important things is make certain dog's toenails are ready for hard running. Here is an excellent link that shows proper trimming.

https://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fltp-cdn-endpoint.azureedge.net%2Fltp-test%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F06%2FNail-Trimming-Diagram.png&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lovethatpet.com%2Fdogs%2Fgrooming%2Ftrimming-dogs-nails%2F&docid=NO5CaTQFUWsS6M&tbnid=-UMqtGuFHKql2M%3A&vet=1&w=960&h=606&hl=en-US&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim

Good stuff to revive boots.

     The shotgun needs to get some serious use too, to freshen up the muscle memory. It has been way too long. Boots are new and broken in, and there are plenty of shotgun shells on the shelf. Maybe the Filson pants need new wax.

     One of the nicest things about upland hunting is there isn’t a lot of paraphernalia needed. It’s time to start pouring over maps and plan the season.

Ripsnorter Magalloway Magic showing her stuff last year.

A Skeptic…

     Being a skeptical Yankee, I might be a bit slow to accept new ideas. At my age, I’ve seen enough new ideas come and go to let other’s try them first before I jump in.

Gun-tips 

     One of the reasons I love upland hunting is there isn’t a lot of gear needed, unlike duck  hunting where you accumulate a boat load of decoys, calls, waders, and the list goes on.Turkey and deer hunting can be almost as bad if you let it. Upland hunting only requires a shotgun, a fistful of shells, and a bird dog, and I’ve heard tell some do it without a dog, but I can’t imagine that. 

     Anyway, a company that makes a product called Swab/its contacted me to see if I wanted to try a few samples, for free. Being a New England Yankee, the free part caught my attention.

     Opening the package kindled my skepticism. The foam tips looked like they would dissolve in gun cleaning solvents. Would they last more than one use?

Swab/its

     Well, I’m a believer. The little Gun-tips are great for cleaning inside the gun, getting the dirt out of all the corners and they don’t leave lint behind. Solvents don’t affect them and when they do get dirty I have just washed them out with warm water. Maybe the manufacturer doesn’t want to hear that.

     The bore swipes do a good job. I keep one for solvent and another lightly oiled to run through the bore when I think it is clean. So far so good. They come in a variety of gauges and calibers.

     Sometimes a new idea comes along that works.

A Slow Season

    After a slow start the 2016 bird season improved slightly, if only because we finally received some much needed rain and the woods returned to something near normal.            

    The usually abundant streams that dried up in August again had water in them. And the late arriving cooler temperatures helped both the dogs and hunters stay comfortable.

    Finding grouse remained difficult, but woodcock were easier. We never found a bumper flight, but the numbers were average. Luck has a lot to do with hitting a memorable flights of woodcock. There was that day in the National Forrest a few years ago where we flushed more woodcock in a hour than we do some seasons. I am sure it will happen again, but not this year as the shooting season has closed and there are ten inches of snow on the ground.

    Even well into November a few grouse could be found hanging around apple trees that still had fruit. Usually by then the fruit is gone and so have the grouse, but in spite of the drought there was a bumper crop of small apples. Hunting the clear cuts took lots of walking between birds. Deer hunting in late November with several inches of snow on the ground I have yet to see a grouse track of flush a bird.

   During fifteen years of keeping records, this was the slowest year yet. Let’s hope for better numbers next year.

A Tough Year

Taking a break on a hot day.

    This year has been warmer than normal and extremely dry, and where are the grouse?  

    So far the bird season has been frustrating. Early on a few grouse were found around apple trees, perhaps for the moisture in the fruit, but many of the usual coverts are empty or nearly so. Our daily average has been the lowest in years.

    A great number of the little streams that usually wind down the hillsides dried up. In the past woodcock could often be found in the moist ground along them. Alder flats that are usually wet and muddy became easy walking. In spite of the lack of rain the apple trees had a bumper crop of fruit, and blueberries, raspberries, highbush cranberries did the same. Did the abundant fruit cause the birds to scatter?

    The spring weather wasn’t unusually wet or cold, so I expected good brood numbers. Wet cold weather right after hatching can wipe out much of a year’s young grouse. The entire year has been unusually dry, and since the spring particularly so.

The usual wet lowlands were just low.

    But the weather has turned now and the migrating woodcock have showed up. The grouse are still sketchy and hard to find, yet we keep trying. Almost all of the leaves have dropped and it is a great time to be in the woods. When a bird goes up at least we can see it.

   We’ll keep trying and perhaps figure out these grouse yet.