First MI Sharpie Season in 12 Years
(WI DNR photo)
You Don’t Need a Dog!
(Before anyone gets their skirt all a-twitter, yes, hunting with a dog can be great. But some bird hunters – even Serious ones – don’t have dogs and need to realize they still have upland bird hunting opportunities. Just have to hunt dead very thoroughly!)
Michigan’s first sharp-tailed grouse season in 12 years starts Oct. 10 and runs through Halloween. Pretty cool, eh? Here are some excerpts from an excellent article by Eric Sharp of the Detroit Free Press:
> While the initial hunt will only be in parts of two counties in the eastern Upper Peninsula, our sharp-tailed numbers apparently have not only been stable but are greater than biologists realized.
> Most of the sharp-tailed grouse habitat in the eastern Upper Peninsula that will be open to hunting Oct. 10-31 is on private land, and hunters will need to get permission in advance from local farmers.
> One of the beauties of hunting sharp-tailed grouse is you don’t need a dog to find them. And pointers aren’t much use because sharp-tailed grouse rarely hold for dogs — the grouse move so quickly that by the time the hunters get to where the pointer is pointing, the birds are 50 yards away. But retrievers can be invaluable in locating downed birds, because sharp-tailed grouse camouflage is amazing.
> Most sharp-tailed grouse hunting, until it closed in 1998, was done in the eastern U.P., where farming and regular forest fires maintained the open grasslands that succeeded the forests cut off in the late 19th and early 20th Century. These birds were so tied to burned-over prairies that Native Americans called them “fire grouse.”
> Terry Minzey, a DNRE wildlife supervisor in Newberry, said today sharp-tailed grouse are found all across the eastern U.P. That’s because the U.P. has more of the 60% grassland to 40% shrubland that sharp-tailed grouse prefer.
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> The bag limits are: 2 per day, 4 possession, 6 season.
> Here’s a map from the MI DNR website:
The DNR states: “The area open to sharp-tailed grouse hunting Oct. 10-31 in Zone 1 (U.P.) includes the shaded area shown below. A free sharp-tailed grouse stamp, available from all license agents or online, is required in addition to a valid small game hunting license.”
Category: MI, Sharptailed Grouse
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