The ruffed grouse is to the forest what pheasants are to the grasslands. But unlike the flashier, bigger plains bird, you can’t bully a grouse around. The “we-got-’em-surrounded” mentality that often works with pheasants—big crowds pushing a section of real estate to pinch birds and force them to flight—won’t get you anywhere in the grouse woods. No, this is one bird that requires finesse.
As I explained in the first installment of “Grouse—The Stealth Approach,” my group of friends and I didn’t have much opportunity to get together. We also didn’t have a lot of time to get our dogs off the trucks and really hunting, so between the “We-gottem-surrounded!” approach we had and the refusal of any one of us—even me, guilty as charged—to rotate our dogs throughout the day, there were far too many of hunters and canines working any given piece of that wonderful grouse real estate at any one time. I concluded “Part I” by providing some hard-learned advice on hunting by yourself or with just one partner. The beauty to that method is that a hunter doesn’t even need a dog. But I don’t know a died-in-the-wool grouse hunter who would set forth without one, so that’s what we’re going to talk about now.
Man’s Best Friend
Grouse hunting is the domain of pointing dogs. Setters, pointers, short-hairs, and Brittanies rule the roost here, though having one of those and a flushing dog like a Lab or a cocker or springer along certainly makes a nice day out, too. Most hunters know the key to successful upland hunting with dogs is good dog training, but, in reality, most amateur handlers rarely know what that fully encompasses. My West Virginia grouse-hunting friends were good examples of this.
Ours were hunts that seemed to resemble track events. The group’s collective approach was to push as much countryside as it could as fast as it could. I don’t know whether these guys had been taught that way or if, over their years pursuing grouse, had come to believe it was necessary, but we blistered the countryside. Even in years I was in relatively good shape, I often huffed and puffed to keep up with the group of brawny men.
Aside from their driving belief that it was miles covered that put birds in the bag, I now know the bigger reason we marched so hard was because none of our dogs—not even mine, at the time—were finished dogs. For a pointing dog to be truly finished, or fully trained, he needs to hold point until the handler orders otherwise. That means for five seconds or five minutes or five hours—whatever it takes. A finished pointing dog does not crowd the bird, does not creep on his point, and never flushes the bird. Further, he should remain staunch when the bird flushes and the gun is fired, or, as is commonly known, is “steady to wing and shot.”
Part of this philosophy is a safety issue. If the dog is steady to wing and shot, you not only know where he is, but he will not be leaping into the pellet string if you fire at a low-flying bird.
Another factor is that those that aren’t steady to the wing or flush, usually give chase to the bird once it begins to fly off—and that can negate circling around and relocating that grouse again for a second-shot chance. Grouse don’t usually fly far after flushing. If you move quietly along the flight path, you can often relocate a once-flushed bird some 30 to, say, 100 yards from where he first rose. But if your pointing dog won’t remain steady to the flush, he’s probably full of other bad habits like creeping and crowding, and probably flushing more birds than you can imagine.
So what you have with a pointing dog that isn’t finished is a dog you can’t trust out of your sight. Back on those West Virginia hunts, we rushed to get to our dogs so we could flush the birds before the dogs took matters into their own paws. It didn’t mean our dogs didn’t point, it didn’t mean that they couldn’t find birds, it was just an issue of them not being completely steady.
Of course, this meant that we kept our dogs at pretty close range. Lots of amateur handlers never let their pointing dogs range out of sight for exactly the reason I just discussed: they can’t trust their dogs. But are you really finding more birds with a dog you keep under your thumb? Maybe one or two, but really, if you’re going to hunt with a close-working pointing dog on a bird that holds as well as the ruffed grouse, you’d probably kick up just as many without him. The “point” of a pointing dog is to find birds you the hunter are not finding. And for that to happen, you need to let him range. The more ground he’s covering, the more birds he’s finding. It doesn’t mean you don’t want him to close it down a bit in really thick cover, but repeat after me: It is okay to let my pointing dog range out of my sight. Not convinced? Stay tuned for the final installment in this series!
Author’s Bio
Jennifer L.S. Pearsall is an outdoor writer, photographer, and editor, who has been a professional in the hunting and shooting industries for nearly 20 years. She began her career by selling guns in a retail establishment in Northern Virginia in the early 1990s, before being recruited by the NRA to join its editorial staff. She has long been a dedicated sporting clays competitor, and has also dabbled in IPSC and metallic blackpowder cartridge competitions. Ms. Pearsall is a practiced and dedicated hunter, with her fair share of big-game trophies decorating her home, but her deepest passions are bird dogs and upland bird and waterfowl hunting.
Since her tenure with the NRA, Ms. Pearsall’s freelance writings and editing work have appeared in dozens of outdoors print and online publications, including Gun Dog, Wildfowl, Whitetail Journal, Petersen’s Hunting, Waterfowl & Retriever, and various publications of the National Rifle Association and Safari Club International, among others. She has also written under the pen name C. Fergus Covey as a gun test and evaluation expert for Gun Tests magazine. Currently she is authoring the blog www.HuntingTheTruth.com.
Ms. Pearsall currently resides in San Antonio, Texas, with her two dogs, an aging Lab named Noah, and a squirrel-obsessed English pointer called Highway.
