Thursday, February 17, 2005
Bill Cochran's Outdoors: Hits and misses in the grouse season
Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.
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On the final day that Ed Bradley got to hunt grouse during the 2004-05 season, he was pushing through cover in Pulaski County.
“I would say my season this year was better than last year,” he reported. “However, my flush rate was still less than one-per hour.”
Grouse hunting can entail beating through thickets, climbing lung-searing ridges and having guarded hawthorn branches dig into your hide. The number of birds you flush is a cyclical indication of what kind of season your are having. Like the Dow Jones Averages, there can be bullish peaks and languishing downturns.
One bird flushed per hour of pursuit is something of a benchmark. Anything below that is disappointing and anything above it is encouraging. My results this season, which ended Feb. 12, were dismal. So I have been asking guys like Bradley and Cliff Rexrode, serious grouse hunters, what kind of season they’ve had. At the close of the season, you can do that without the uncomfortable feeling that you are prying.
“I was more successful north of Roanoke than in the New River Valley,” Bradley said. “Bath County was the best for me.”
But his biggest discovery may have occurred during that last hunt in Pulaski County. That’s when he ran into a hunter from Mount Airy, N.C. who said he’d been having a productive season.
“He was hunting two English setters and had already bagged a bird that morning,” said Bradley. “He stated he had flushed 80 birds this season and had killed 40.”
That’s a bunch of birds and an amazing success ratio.
“Where do you hunt?” asked Bradley.
“All over,” replied the hunter.
It was a typical response from a grouse hunter. Some things in life you don’t share with strangers. The lairs you’ve found that hold grouse are one of them.
The encounter with the obviously seasoned, hard-working, dog-owning hunter pretty well ruined the day for Bradley. He was bambarded with troubling thoughts: Why hadn’t he flushed more birds? Had he worked hard enough at it? Had he failed to find the hot spots?
“There are grouse out there, you just have to work hard to find them,” said Bradley, expressing a philosophy that keeps brush-worn hunters coming back day after day, season after season. Optimism also is the balm that eases the pain of knowing that mid-February is as far away as you can be from opening day. What you have between now and then are reflections of the past season and hope for the new one.
Cliff Rexrode, a forest consultant who lives in Waynesboro, is looking back on a good season. He and his steady hunting partner killed 32 birds.
“That’s the most we’ve gotten in a season since 1990,” he said. “I have talked to a lot of grouse hunters, but so far have not heard of anyone that has had a good season but us.”
Multiple flushes were more common this season, and there was a healthy mix of gender and age of the birds, said Rexrode.
“Last year every flush was on single birds. Last year every bird killed was a mature cock bird. This year a nice mix of hens, young cocks and mature birds.”
Rexrode and his partner enjoyed a very respectable killing rate of 36 percent.
“We hunted good dogs with a good number of pointed birds that improved our chance to have a good shot on the flush,” he said.
It will be several weeks before the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries pools the flush rates of the hunters involved in the agency’s annual survey. I am going to guess that the results of Rexrode and the North Carolina hunter were exceptional, that the survey will show for the rest of us it was a slightly better season than last year, but still a tough one.
