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Thursday, February 28, 2008

Want to kill more grouse? Grab a good hunting partner, head for a clearcut

By Bill Cochran

Virginia’s grouse hunting season is over and it is a long time until October and opening day, so what does a grouse hunter do on a cold, late-February morning?

If you are Cliff Rexrode, you tally your 2007-08 results: days afield, hours hunted, grouse flushed, shots fired, birds killed.

The most important measurement of the quality of a grouse hunt or grouse season isn’t the number of birds in your bag; rather, it is the number of birds flushed per hour of effort.

The past 30 years or so, this figure has averaged 1.15, according to the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries’ grouse survey. What that means, it takes nearly one hour of pushing through grouse cover for every bird you flush. Sadly, that figure has been growing more daunting in recent years.

When Rexrode, of Waynesboro, made his tally, he came up with some fascinating information. The days he spent with his outdoor partner Urbie Nash, their flush rate was close to twice what it was when Nash hunted alone. Here is the difference:

>REXRODE/NASH COMBO: 2.16 flushes per hour; 7.8 flushes per outing and 1.7 birds killed.

>NASH ALONE (or with an occasional friend): 0.82 flusher per hour, 2.8 flushes per outing and 0.35 birds killed.

Maybe you think Rexrode is setting himself up as some kind of expert that Nash is lucky to have at his side.

No question, Rexrode is good. He is a professional forester, which means he spends considerable more time climbing ridges than sitting behind a desk. There isn’t an ounce of fat on him. Without breaking a sweat, he can leave an ordinary man gasping for breath. He has the uncanny ability to know exactly where he is in remote cover, or more importantly, which direction the truck is in. He is a skillful wingshot. In short, he is the kind of guy you envy.

The flush figures being flaunted by Rexrode aren’t for boasting, but for making a point.

“This really shows how two experienced grouse hunters can be much more productive hunting as a team than one person,” he said.

“Urbie has a very good dog that points a lot of birds, but often he does not get a shot when the bird flushes when he is alone,” said Rexrode. “On the seven hunts we were out together, I saw 14 birds that Urbie never saw. He saw or heard about the same number that I never would have known about.”

No matter how good your partner or your dogs happen to be, the challenge of grouse hunting nowadays is locating good habitat. Habitat for grouse in Virginia, for the most part, is early successional woodlands with areas of acorn production.

Anti-management activists, who sell the lie that the only good forest is an old-growth forest, have gone a long way toward shutting down timber harvesting on the national forests of Virginia. Cutting continues on forest industry land, such as Meade-Westvaco property, but much of this land has been sold or leased to big game hunters. Private, non-industrial woodland often is being converted to other land uses or the quality of grouse habitat is declining.

“We really have to work hard to find good coverts, and spend a lot of hours scratching through non-productive sites,” said Rexrode.

Rexrode and Nash directed much of their efforts at clear-cuts, but not many new ones are being produced. This dampens the hope that grouse hunting ever will improve in its southern range, which includes Virginia.

The 10-year period between the 1981-82 season and the 1990-91 season are called “the glory years of grouse hunting” by Rexrode and Nash.

“A most revealing stat is in those days we averaged finding 9.66 individual birds a day,” said Rexrode. “Over the last five years, we’re finding 4.44 birds per day, and the hours hunted per day are the same.”

It hurts to think what will happen as this trend continues.

“If the overall number of acres clear-cut by the U.S. Forest Service remains at current levels we will never see grouse hunting like it was before 1991,” Rexrode said.

ONE OF THE BEST WAYS to recapture the “good old days” of grouse hunting is by supporting the Ruffed Grouse Society. A fund-raising banquet has been scheduled by the Virginia Mountains Chapter, 6 p.m. April 12 at the Roanoke Plaza Hotel (formerly Wyndham). Information and tickets from Brandon Harper.

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