Vermont Grouse Weekend

[Dean Romig]

After helping my friend and host, Tom, roof his new pole barn with 75 sheets of plywood and 15 rolls of that heavy sticky ice-dam protective covering on the entire roof I got to get out in the woods for some grouse chasin'. We (three of us) started the roof at about 8:15 a.m and finished at 12:10 p.m. and I was completely exhausted *pant-pant* The roof is 66' X 46'.

Grouse numbers in the area I hunt remain down and the report is that it was a poor spring for the survival of the chicks. Almost all of my 10 flushes on Saturday were wild and way out - none of which provided a shot. This indicates to me, at least this early in the season, that the majority of those birds are older birds - not this year's crop. I did take one shot at the right-breaking bird of a pair that flushed about fifteen yards in front of me and never got swung on the left bird in time. When I shot at the right bird it was about to disappear behind the screen of a fully leafed apple tree and the amount of foliage and twigs that cascaded down indicated I was behind the bird by mere fractions of an inch and the bird came rocketing out on the other side and disappeared behind more foliage... a clean miss...

I was back on the same "scrubapple hillside" on Sunday and was hunting just thirty or forty yards to the right of where that pair flushed the day before. Some movement caught my eye on the ground ahead of me and the closer I got the more frantic the movement. It was a grouse trying desperately to get airborn and just couldn't get higher than two or three feet off the ground. I realized what it was.... the bird I shot at the day before had actually been hit and I failed to see any evidence of a hit. Usually in such cases I will search for as much as thirty minutes to find birds I think I have hit. I wrote this one off as a complete miss... but boy, was I wrong. I gave her a mercy shot in the head and was glad I didn't leave her for coyote fodder. As you can see, this is a 'bird of the year'.

No, I don't hunt with a dog... sometimes by choice - sometimes not... but a good bird dog certainly earns its keep in so many situations and gathering in wing-tipped birds is right up there near the top.