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.

Every year, I used to hunt with four or five gentlemen on some private, long-abandoned logging grounds we had access to in the mountains of West Virginia. It was unbelievably gorgeous grouse habitat: vast meadows of wild grasses hugged the hilly terrain and were interspersed by ancient apple orchards and hawthorne tree stands. Where the selective logging had occurred, downed, left-over logs were surrounded by myriad berry-bearing shrubbery and young tree re-growth. It had everything, everything, more than a few grouse could want—shelter, food, edge, and relatively little encroachment from humans. The place never failed us. We always shot grouse (and more than a few woodcock when the migration was on). But knowing what I know now, we could have done better.

Our first problem was that there was usually a half-dozen of us hunting together. But it wasn’t just the number of hunters that compromised the quality of the hunt, it was also the fact that we usually had as many dogs between us. Okay, you’re probably thinking there was plenty of acreage that we could all have spread out on, but that’s not how we did it. Because we were all weekend warriors, whose hunting efforts were squashed by the daily demands of jobs and families in the city, after a long drive and a crappy motel stay, we all had to put our dogs down, at the same time, and hunt any given area together, en masse. The result was a circus.

Now, part of my group’s three-ring problem was due to the environment. I never hunted those mountains when the winds weren’t howling, and the weather was often just altogether brutal, with stinging drizzle, sleet, pouring rain, and freezing temperatures. To hear over the wind and elements as we pushed the ground, we were loud. “Bird! Bird!” one or three would shout, as a grouse was gotten up and fired at. Naturally, with all of our hearing abilities diminished, there was usually a cadence of shouts and gun fire that continued as each bird maneuvered, often unscathed, between all of us and the trees. Our dogs’ beepers and bells, naturally, added to the ruckus. Like I said, it was a circus.

Sound crazy? It was. But I’ve witnessed plenty of other hunters take this group approach over the years, and, well, I’m here to tell you, there’s a better way.

Crowd Control

Six of us abreast in the typical pheasant-field formation often did not much more than push the birds continually ahead of us. And if you were thinking four pointing dogs and a Lab must have balanced that out, well, you’d just be wrong. In all, while we never went home empty-handed, we had the wrong approach.

The right way? For as many hunters as we were gathered in that mountainous West Virginia terrain, and despite the fact that any of us had precious few opportunities to get together at one time, we should have split up. We should have set out in pairs in completely different directions, each pair with no more than a brace of dogs. From a full-limit standpoint, the camaraderie would have been better left for lunch and the end-of-day flask sip. To put it bluntly, grouse hunting is not a group sport.

Shhhhh!

We had another problem, given that we hunted as such as large group, and that was excess noise, emphasis on the “excess.” With grouse, the trick to gun-ready flushes lies somewhere between silence and sounds that will startle

You and a friend (I’ll get to the dogs in the next installment), working at a leisurely pace through the woods, kicking through dry leaves, snapping twigs, and keeping conversation minimal, will usually encourage the ruffed grouse to hunker down and hold tight. Evolution has taught them that their wonderful plumage is terrific camouflage, if they will just hold still—well, up to a point, anyway. Hold too long, and that fox or bobcat padding through the understory is going to pounce. But you know what that fox or bobcat does before he pounces? It gets quiet. These predators sit back on their haunches or crouch down on their bellies, pausing to make sure the energy they’re about to expend will result in a captured meal. It’s in that moment of stillness that a pinned grouse will often opt to exercise his alternate survival skill—he’s going to flush.

My advice is to hunt grouse like the predators do. Move steadily but easily through the cover, keeping noise to just what your brush pants and canvas coat sleeves make as they pass. Walk for a while then stop. Stay quiet for a moment, look around, and be ready to shoot. If a grouse is nearby, there’s an excellent chance he’s going to take air the second you scratch the leaves with your toe to step forward again.

This minimalist, this stealth approach, is the way to kill grouse. You are playing to the birds’ known behavior, instincts that have served them well over centuries. Too, proceeding in this manner, you are setting yourself up to be best prepared to take the shot when it presents itself. You’ve looked around, noted the trees a flushing ruffie is likely to fly between, and now have a much better chance of putting a bacon-wrapped grouse breast in the pan instead of seeing just a few tail feathers drifting to ground.

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.