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One of the most important things I have found while navigating the wilderness with a toddler in tow is involving them in the activity. No, this doesn’t mean having your toddler go and retrieve birds for you. Instead, it means something as simple as listening to different songbirds while hunting and asking, “Did you hear that?” or identifying different trees, mushrooms, or animals. 

I often find myself narrating a large majority of a hunt when my daughter is on my back. How much of this she can actually hear is debatable, given that she’s wearing hearing protection. Still, I believe it helps my daughter’s understanding of certain situations, like a dog working scent or training their ears to hear the twittering wings of a woodcock and the thunderous flush of a ruffed grouse. 

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What makes an ideal grouse gun, or what Gene Hill would call “a gun of specialist function?” Does action type matter? What about gauge? How does the environment play into it? How has the modernization of gun-making changed grouse guns? How different is a grouse gun from a clays gun? How different is a gun built for ruffed grouse hunting versus shotguns used for other wild game? While I don’t have all the answers, I do have theories. Like any evolving tradition, they’re built on the backs of those who came before me.

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Birds primarily rely on sight and sound to evade predators. We know that ruffed grouse are far more jumpy in high winds because their hearing is impaired. Living in dense cover has heightened their dependence on sound. In my opinion, their sense of hearing is often greater than sight. When we factor in transgenerational stress inheritance, we gain insight into sound’s profound impact on ruffed grouse hunting. 

No matter how good the dog’s work may be, its bell’s jingle alerts grouse. The birds understand the threat, beginning evasive movements well before a dog has a chance to catch scent. Between scenting conditions, bird locations, and weather, a million variables stack up against us in unknown ways. These odds are daunting enough to dissuade us from adding another variable that would put a dog at an inherent disadvantage. However, the efficiency of killing is far from the pinnacle of the true love of grouse hunting, and interpreting the language of a dog bell is often part of that joy. 

Bells, talking, and walking through cover all impact grouse well before contacts are made. This is no new theory, and while I have experimented in recent years by leaving the dog bell in the truck, one can go back as far as the late 1800s to read from our forefathers on the topic of grouse and sound. 

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If I could smell a bird, walk effortlessly through thick brush, and cover ten times as much ground as the average human, Woodcock hunting would be a breeze. If I had a dog which could do all these things, Woodcock hunting would be even more of a breeze.

Unfortunately I can’t smell birds, I’m a slow walker, and I don’t have a dog.

The problem is that I’ve grown increasingly fond of hunting American woodcock. I am a dog-less hunter with a young family and limited time to hunt, so pounding the ground in search of good woodcock cover just isn’t an option. As a lifelong deer hunter and avid trapper, I do more than 50% of my scouting on a computer. It might seem a a bit unorthodox to adapt this aspect of my deer hunting to woodcock hunting. But so far, it’s paid off.

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One of the most constantly changing topics in the field of veterinary medicine is flea and tick prevention for dogs. Hunting dogs are some of the most exposed and susceptible victims to ectoparasites such as ticks, fleas, mites and other insects. Every year, it is important to purchase preventative products for your dog and to ask your veterinarian what new products are available. 

In this article, I will discuss the three different types of preventative products and why they are so important to protect your hunting partner. This includes collars, topical treatments, and oral preventatives.

I highly encourage every dog owner to have this discussion with their veterinarian because insect prevention is a transient part of this field. Remember, it is rarely the insect itself that’s the issue. The parasites that insects transmit through their bites are what cause issues in our dogs.

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Generally speaking, grassland grouse are not the most adaptable critters. Both prairie chicken species need large expanses of grassland, while sage grouse must have large expanses of sagebrush to thrive. The one exception to this rule is the sharp-tailed grouse. 

While generally considered a grassland species, sharpies range from the shrub-scrub grasslands in Wisconsin through the vast prairies of the northern U.S. Great Plains and Canada, culminating in the shrublands of Alaska. That’s a huge geographic range, encompassing a wide variety of habitats, meaning there are lots of plants that are important to sharptails. That said, some plants stand out above all others, and they are found and utilized across most of this bird’s vast range. 

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During my childhood in southern New Hampshire, kids competed to shoot a limit of “pa’tridge,” my brother and myself included. I admit, I lost just about every time to my older brother. However, we thought shooting the limit was a good idea. After all, it was the 80s.

These birds gave an air of boundless existence. Hunting the droves of ruffed grouse in the Berkshires of Massachusetts when our grandfather was setting up a stand seemed almost too easy. We believed the grouse there and in the woods by my father’s house would be there forever.

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Sage-grouse need large, connected, and mostly treeless swaths of sagebrush to survive. Without this, sage-grouse cease to exist. It’s that simple. Sage-grouse are what scientists and biologists call a sagebrush obligate species. You can’t have sage-grouse without sage.

Sage-grouse occupy western sagebrush (Artemisia sp.) prairies of California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and into the province of Saskatchewan. Although sage-grouse still live in all these places, their populations have shrunk. The largest core populations still thrive in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon. Uncoincidentally, these are the same states with the most intact and healthy sagebrush landscapes.

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Each September, an inexplicable reverence stirs within me as I patiently await the chance to roam Wyoming’s boundless public lands in pursuit of the bird that holds my heart—the iconic sage grouse. There’s something almost spiritual about stepping into the vast sea of sagebrush and feeling the landscape’s timeless pull. 

For many hunters, pursuing these majestic birds is a rare, once-in-a-lifetime adventure, often meticulously planned months or years ahead. Preparation and knowledge are key in order to appreciate and succeed in this journey.

Sage grouse populations stretch across eleven western states—Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Yet only seven states still permit sage grouse hunting, and season lengths and bag limits are carefully controlled.

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Recently, the states of Nebraska and South Dakota have been getting most of the attention from hunters seeking to pursue greater prairie-chickens. This makes a lot of sense, given the good population of birds in these states and the abundance of publicly accessible land available to hunt. However, Kansas has long been a leader in greater prairie-chicken harvest and continues to provide excellent hunting. With a long season and the ability to harvest other species while chasing chickens, you should consider Kansas for your next prairie-chicken hunt.

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