Finally got around to eating this Sage grouse and the Sharptails from ND. Smoking good! Cooked em rare like a whitetail ham steak. People who says these things are inedible must be brutally overcooking them.
Great question. We count every flush we see and every flush we hear. That’s why we keep the “birds shot at” statistic as well. I keep these stats this way because that’s the way they are recorded for submission to the Loyal Order of Dedicated Grouse Hunter’s hunter survey (which is really cool...
Report from Friday October 25:
My partner and I had a great morning hunting, flushing 11 grouse and 10 woodcock out of the two covers we hit that morning. We managed to each kill a grouse and we killed 5 woodcock between us.
The afternoon turned out much slower with only a few more grouse...
Covers here are great. We are seeing less birds here than in WI years past but we are chalking that up to less birds on the ground because of the poor June brood conditions as opposed to thinking there are less birds here than in WI.
Definitely less out of state pressure here than in N WI...
Much slower day today. Partially because we took it easy today after running ourselves ragged the last two days with hard hunts and many hours in the woods. And partially because of weather. We took the afternoon off to stay out of the rain.
Thursday 10/24/24 totals (half day of hunting, got...
Brent, I would say that we are definitely seeing fewer juvenile birds than years past. And seeing mostly single flushes whereas in past years double flushes and even a few triples were more common. Overall, bird numbers seem down compared to the last few years. Seems like the large rain events...
We ventured further north today in our pursuit of grouse. It did not reveal more birds. Until it did. We got into them in the last hour and a half of the hunt. I think my partner and I had 12 flushes between 4pm and 5:30pm. I didn’t shoot well but still managed to kill 2, maybe 3 grouse and two...
Another great day in Minnesota, better shooting would have led to a few more grouse in the bag, but that’s always the case. I flushed a truck bird 20 yards from the truck at the end of the day that would have been the perfect end cap to a beautiful day and he gave me a sporting opportunity but I...
Monday 10/21/24
Another half day of hunting, afternoon spent fishing because of heat
Group totals:
Grouse flushed: 17
Shot at: 7
Killed: 2
Woodcock flushed: 0
Shot at: 0
Killed: 0
I got lucky again and killed another grouse. A beautiful gray phase.
It was warm today. Got up to 70. We only hunted till noon to give the dogs, and us, a break in the heat. Grouse flushes were down but I managed to kill a juvenile red phase on a very lucky shot and we got into some woodcock and I killed 2 of those as well. And then we went fishing for the...