MN Grouse Hunt Report, Days 4 and 5

No birds here?! (Click to see way bigger.)

We knew some bad weather was heading our way later in the week, so our plan for day 4 was to get the most out of it – meaning hunt the areas where we’d found the most birds. That area was about an hour away, but after a disappointing day 3, we were all for going where we knew we could find birds. Or thought we could.

So we had a plan to hunt where we had on day 2, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans…. (It hurts to even remember this!)

On the way out, we stopped at the Chippewa National Forest info station again, and met a very helpful guy – but in retrospect we should’ve recognized he wasn’t a Serious Grouse Hunter, and thus not taken his recommendations. Of course, it not being “retrospect” at the time, we did exactly the opposite.

Isn’t much to tell here, except that we hunted the local Walker area for many hours, and it sucked. We drove and walked and barely found anything worth hunting, let alone any birds.

At some point we looked at each other and said forget this (maybe it was a different F word!), got in the car and drove up the east side of Leech Lake, on our way to the north side. We were headed to the north side because Mikey of Reed’s Outdoors told us a bird-hunting buddy had put up some birds there. Nothing specific, but his info had worked for us great on day 2.

On the way up the east side of the lake, he we hunted a stupidly good-looking aspen stand. Even though it was off a main road we expected to put up at least a couple of birds. But we didn’t. We saw some grouse poop, nothing really recent, and that was it except for a wolf skull that Brendan found.

We finished off this depressing (not really) day by hunting some cuts on the north side of the lake. Some was good-looking stuff, some was ratty stuff that looked like nobody would hunt it – so we did. We ended up putting up three grouse and five woodcock. Brandon shot one Woody and Jay missed one (too easy).

Too bad we didn’t spend the whole day there….

Day 5, Here Comes the Storm

We knew the weather would be tough on day 5. So far it hadn’t been as bad as the meteorologists had predicted, but the forecast weather for the end of our hunting week seem to be going from bad to worse.

For this day, rain and lots of wind were in the forecast. Not great, but we’d hunted those conditions before and were up for doing it again.

The host of the Focus Outdoors TV bird-hunting show, Tom Poorker, told us about an area that we started with. It again was not close to Walker, but by then we couldn’t get away from Walker fast enough, plus Tom knows Minnesota and is a former grouse guide. So we weren’t about to ignore him. Especially on a day like that.

On the way, we stopped at a cut we’d hunted on day 2, where we’d flushed five grouse. We headed right to where we found those birds and – not one. But we did flush eight woodies where there had been none before. We didn’t shoot any because we were hyper-focused on grouse.

We headed out of that spot stomping through an area where there had been no birds on day 2. Sure enough, a grouse flushed between us, went straight over Jay’s head and should’ve been dead but Jay’s safety jammed – again. For while after that, Jay was so mad Brendan was afraid one of his eyeballs was going to spontaneously pop out of his head.

‘Tough To Hear Anything…’

Next we hunted Tom’s area. It definitely had some good habitat, but the wind was so bad it was nuts. At one point Jay thought he heard a flush in front of Brendan. He asked Brendan if he’d heard it, and Brendan responded with what’s now a classic line: “I don’t know, man. It’s tough to hear anything out of here.”

We should’ve packed it in right there!

But of course, being Serious, we didn’t. And we never saw or heard a bird again until the end of the day, even though we hunted just about every area we could think of – even ones we swore wouldn’t hold birds.

Hunting mature pines? Why not?!

We were wet and cold – more cold than wet. The air temp had dropped at least 15 degrees since the morning, which was weird. So we decided not to leave the truck unless we saw A+ a habitat. And finally, we did: Trees of the right age bisected by old roads and border by swamps and a ridge. It looked too good to pass up, even though at that point we were thinking about steak and beer!

We headed in on either side of a road, and literally within two minutes a fat gray bird flushed from Brendan across the road and right in front of Jay. Actually, we think it ran across the road and then saw Jay and flushed from there…but regardless, Jay was in outer space somewhere and never connected with the bird. He fired two times but never got the gun up (mounted).

He said later it was like fishing in summer on the ocean for 6 solid hours and never getting a bite, and then suddenly getting one and missing the fish. Excuses….

Further back in the cover Brendan found a huge drumming log with a ton of poop on it, but we never put up another grouse. We did flush three woodcock – Jay had an easy shot at one but of course missed, putting the cap on the screwball day.

Our last spot, a good one (click to see way bigger).

The Count and the Storm

Our day 5 count was two grouse and 10 woodies – not terrible given the conditions, which seemed to be getting even worse on our way back to the cabin. Sure enough, they were.

We got back to the cabin, soaking wet, and found the power out. Not a big deal. We went out to the Lucky Moose for dinner, then messed around playing Big Buck Hunter until about 10:00 at night.

We headed back to the cabin with high but tempered hopes – and found that the power was definitely still out. We knew before we even saw the cabin because we couldn’t get down the driveway: The power lines were down. Multiple trees were down on the power lines.

Well, we ended up at a motel that had power (mostly), had a few bourbons and then crashed, listening to the wind literally howl outside.

Oh yeah: By then we’d been called by family and friends inquiring about how we were doing. We thought that was pretty odd until they told us that the reason they were calling was because we were right in the middle of a record storm, basically a hurricane over land. Well, that explained a lot.

We were wondering if day 6 would turn out to be our first day where the weather would literally be too rough to hunt. It had never happened to us before, but….

Category: 2010-11 reports, Focus Outdoors TV, Hunt reports, MN, Ruffed Grouse, SBH, Woodcock