RUFFED GROUSE & PHEASANTS - Minnesota Combination Limit

Yeah, I was a whole lot younger back then, and those two pups were pretty special dogs. 

Critter & Woogs as pups, hunting ruffed grouse in southeast Minnesota and pheasants in southcentral Minnesota. This was the first time that I tried to take this combination limit, instead of just hoping it would happen.  There were several days over those years, that I took the 5-bird limit of ruffs, but only got one pheasant, while grouse hunting.  I finally accepted that if I was ever going to take this combination limit, I would have to drive to pheasants. 

Just a few days after this hunt, I tried to duplicate the same combination limit in Iowa, with the pups. We took the 3-bird limit of ruffed grouse in Iowa in less than an hour. Shot a Hun in the first pheasant field. Had two pheasants an hour later, then chased a partial albino pheasant the rest of the day. We flushed that albino three times within 40 yards, but I never could be certain it was a rooster.  I should have just shot one of the several normal roosters the pups flushed. But that's me,  always trying to make a normal hunting day into a special one and a special day into a never before heard of day. 

Well if that wasn't my nature, I wouldn't have had the special days that I talk about, and wouldn't feel like I had anything to offer on podcasts, that all the other guys aren't doing. 

Transcript

PHEASANTS & RUFFED GROUSE

Minnesota Combination Limit 

 Woogie and Critter. They were a hell of a pair. We had just returned home from a mostly prairie grouse hunt that began in North Dakota and ended in Nebraska. They were only eight months old and had already hunted in four states. I shot sharptails, prairie chickens, Hungarian partridge, ruffed grouse, woodcock and doves over them. Including a combination limit of partridge and sharptails in North Dakota, on the second day they had ever been hunting. They were lucky pups. 

 Today we were in southeastern Minnesota with every intention of shooting a combination limit of five ruffed grouse and two pheasants. I had shot a lot of ruffed grouse limits both with and without a dog so I was certain that as long as the pups didn’t range too far, I could do it in half a day. But pheasants were the tough one. I was way too far east to expect to be able to shoot two roosters in a half day. I knew because I had tried off and on for several years. I shot one rooster with a limit of ‘ruffs three or four times, but never two. For the combination limit to happen, I was going to have to pack up and drive. Maybe as far as Highway 63, but at least an hour west. I was resolved to drive until I found really good looking pheasant cover.

 I should have located good pheasant hunting first. That would have been the sensible thing to do. I already had many places that I could shoot a limit of ’ruffs. But nowhere in Minnesota, to hunt pheasants. 

 Hunting ruffed grouse in southern Minnesota was all about timbered ridges. Always choose an un-pastured timber over pastured and those bordered by crop fields were better than those surrounded by pasture. The thing is, with the broken ownership you couldn’t count on anything from the road. It might be pastured along the road and a quarter mile down the ridge be a wooly grouse haven. You just had to get permission and get out and walk. I walked a lot of ridges in that country, all the way from Whitewater to the Iowa border. My opinion was that the nearer I hunted to Iowa, the more birds I would find. There were always plenty of ruffed grouse experts that told me I was wrong, but I shot a lot of ruffed grouse in those days. And you’ve only read about a few.

 I was happy for a partly cloudy day. Sunny days suck for coyote calling and any bird hunting. I chose to start the day with Woogs hoping to bag three grouse from the first cover and then hunt Critter to finish my limit. It was a thoughtful plan but Critter didn’t even get her feet on the ground.

 I started at the top of a public ridge with a brushy draw right up to the road. Woogie and me weren’t 100 yards from the truck before she flushed our first ’ruff. He was too far from a good screen of trunks and fell into the stick-tights between a standing cornfield and the real timber. Woogs was a mess when she came out with the dead grouse. With Woogs I was never sure if she found the birds dead or exacted her own form of frontier justice. All I can say is they died with most of their feathers on and only slight tears in the skin. Woogs was happy to release this bird in my hand fully expecting me to clean all the burrs from her hide. I helped with the ones from her face and between her legs, but those on the outside would be brushed off in the first 100 yards of timber hunting. A working dog was constantly pushing through dead falls, briars, grapevine tangles and downed tops. It was a wonder they would have any hair left by the end of the day, let alone a few stickers. 

We were no more than back at it, when she flushed a pair that split between each edge of timber. I missed with my first shot but clipped a wing with my second at the right hand bird. Knowing this wasn’t going to be a pretty picture session if I didn’t get to that poor cripple before Woogs, I climbed through the fence and then had to sort a different path through a multi-floral rose tangle to get into the real woods with Woogs. I was still kicking through the vines when Woogs came trotting around a limestone boulder with a still live grouse. Just before she reached me, he fluttered a wing and Oopps, he was dead.

The only real nice pictures a guy gets of ruffed grouse is when not retrieved by a dog. ’Ruffs shed their feathers with the least provocation and a little bit of dog slobber will matt them down like a dose of Crew Jell.

Disclaimer:

I realize that most guys reading my stories about ruffed grouse hunting must think I’m an unabashed omitter and chronic liar. I regularly hunted ruffed grouse with only two friends, both from Waterloo, Iowa. Russell and Del. You have or will read in this book of a weekend when Russ and I shot 19 ruffed grouse and 14 woodcock. You won’t read of any of the great hunts I had with Del. I recall an opening day in Iowa when Del and I flushed 6 ruffed grouse and shot all 6 with 7 shells. Another day that started in Minnesota where we shot a rooster and 9 grouse (I was one short of my limit), then dropped down to Iowa where Dell shot two grouse, and me two grouse and two bobwhite quail. Del and I finished the day with 13 grouse one pheasant and two quail. We had many, many exceptional hunts, none of which are in these pages. Species specific limits of mallards, wood ducks and widgeon with limits of ruffed grouse. Iowa and southern Minnesota ruffed grouse hunting used to be that good, and either ruffed grouse aren’t as tough to hit as other writers claim, or we were pretty damn good shots. Personally, I think it was a little of both.  

When you hunt these timbered ridges, the temptation is to walk the outside, field edge, because when you hunt from inside the timber, the grouse fly on the outside. It won’t take long on the outside to learn that they won’t do that with you out there. There will usually be a fence between the field and timber. This will normally be the thickest area, gaining sunlight from both sides. A lot of the grouse will be in this edge, and will flush where you are not. When I hunted this cover, especially when without a dog, I would walk about 25 feet inside the timber. It was my experience that this was about the near limit of tolerance for a ruffed grouse to a hunter. Any nearer and they will flush ahead of you and further and they would not flush at all. What they would do when you were just the right distance, is stand up and shuffle just as you were even with them. They were trying to decide which way to flush, ahead or behind you. I know, it was almost cheating once I realized this tolerance. I didn’t utilize it often, only if they were giving me fits. I only tell you this because there are subtle details that you can learn about any animal you hunt. 

 Another word about ‘ruffs. Don’t dawdle along listening more than hunting. If you hunt slowly, they’ll just walk around you. Always be analyzing the cover ahead of you. Where will a grouse go when he hears me approaching? Nearly always where it’s the thickest. Now, look for which area he will fly towards. Downhill, cut across an opening? Outside or inside the edge? If you ask yourself these questions and act accordingly, you’ll notice a pattern. Every time you hunt, and every flush will teach you more. 

 Always avoid passing near any obstruction you can’t see through. You’ve noticed that if you hold your hand near your eyes, you can’t see anything. The further an object is from the front of your face, the better you can see around it.

 Finally, every hunter has a tendency to pause to watch and listen for a flush. Don’t! Bust through the cover until you have firm footing and a clear view of the potential flush. 

 I realize that I don’t often write of missing ruffed grouse. I shot a lot of recreational skeet back then and I also relived the flushes, routes and where they went if I didn’t shoot, in my mind during the off season. The guys that I hunted with often questioned why I always got most of the shooting. I got most of the shooting because of the above few paragraphs. 

 Another excellent tip is always expect to shoot twice at every bird that flushes. Most importantly being convinced that you will miss, and will shoot again, keeps you from raising your head after the first shot and stopping your swing. Raising your head to watch a bird fall and stopping your swing are the two most common reasons we miss. This tactic alone will double your percentage of hits.   

 Don’t exaggerate the number of birds in a cover thinking re-flushes are new birds. The best way to tell how many there really are is to shoot a few. Dead grouse seldom re-flush. Most guys will find that for every grouse they kill, two will disappear from the cover. 

 You must pay attention to details if you want to be a better hunter. 

Woogs worked the cover fast and I just tried to keep up. The grouse seemed to be concentrated along the edge I chose to hunt and we were flushing birds constantly. I have found that pups learn about birds very quickly, if they get into a lot of birds when they’re young. If nearly every time they nose around a thick brush pile, a ruffed grouse flushes from it, you won’t have a tough time getting them to hunt tight around brush piles. Always take a young dog where the most “single” birds are. Flocks of pheasants running in every direction will bring out some serious drive in a pup, but most of it will be detrimental to good shooting. You might want to avoid large concentrations until they get some hunting sense about them. The issue caused by a lot of dispersed birds is they teach a dog to just run. The pup believes he doesn’t have to use his nose to trail birds. If he just runs around, they’ll flush. That’s a bad lesson for a pup. I’ve mentioned in prairie grouse podcasts that they’re not the best bird to start a flusher on. Prairie grouse usually flush about the time a flusher scents them. My young pups would just bounce up and down when they smell prairie grouse expecting them to flush without being pushed. That’s really bad when they transition to pheasants. 

 But on the other hand, if you’re burdened with serious bird numbers and nowhere else to turn, than you’ll just have to suffer through it. 

 Say you’re hunting pheasants in a big CRP field. Don’t follow your pup everywhere he goes. You’re the boss. You walk where you think the birds should be and expect him to stay in front of you. I’ve said it before, one of the best lessons for a young dog is to see you shoot birds when he wasn’t hunting for you. Let them know you can do this without them. Be that mature dog that the old timers said you should use to train your pup. 

 Me and Woogs had two grouse, and in less than another hour, we would be back at the truck with the five bird limit. Poor Critter wouldn’t even get to run. Apologizing to a pup for shooting a limit over her kennelmate when you promised her that in a couple of hours she would get her turn, is a sad thing to do.

 We shot red phases and grays, cocks and hens, but in the end only one that I got to before Woogs could exfoliate it. I swear some of the birds that she retrieved looked like Old McDonald just pulled them out of the scalding pot. They were going to make sad, sloppy pictures.

 I cut across a picked corn field and even loitered in a couple of grass waterways hoping for a pheasant or two to keep me from driving away. I loved the country I was in and hated to leave.

 I kenneled Woogs at the truck, cleaned out my coat and loaded it with Federal Premium’s then let Critter out for a run. This little dog had a nose for everywhere I walked without her. She would put her nose to the ground like a hound, and take off. In later years I often hunted coyotes in the early morning with her in the truck. If I would let her out to run when I returned she would head over hill and valley running the exact path I followed. Sometimes till she was a speck in the distance.  I wondered if she thought I had Woogs stashed out there and had been shooting birds without her.

 I ate lunch as I drove west, pausing here and there when I’d see something that looked okay and occasionally driving around a couple of sections. A lone slough or patch of CRP will often get pounded by everyone in the area. I look for several farms of good looking cover before I start knocking on doors. 

 I expected the most difficult part of the search would be finding someone home and then getting permission. In one mourning in western Iowa, I knocked on 13 doors and never talked to anyone.

 Finally, I was west of Highway 63 and I started seeing continuous good cover. I picked a farmhouse and a nice lady came to the door. Her husband was at the grain mill and would probably let me hunt. She expected him back home in about an hour. I told her thank you and if I didn’t get permission to hunt somewhere before then, I’d be back. He owned the best ground that I could see from the road.  

 A few miles further west and there was some really good looking ground, picked corn with wet patches, CRP and wooly, willow choked creeks. It was posted. Both sides of the road with annoying yellow signs. So close together that they make you wonder if he hates you.

 Good cover everywhere I looked…“hey a farmhouse with a lot of grain bins!”.  Grain dust billowing up in the back and a hired hand just pulled out with a couple of empty wagons. There must be someone back there. As I was getting out of my truck, the owner came around the corner. I was smiling and he just stared. As I approached, he said, ”Are you blind?” I looked around thinking I either ran over his cat or stepped on his kid’s favorite toy. “You’re the first hunter to stop. Everyone else sees all the No Hunting signs.”

 I just laughed. “Gosh, I was looking at all the cover and I just forgot about them.” There was a huge hand painted one on the utility pole just above my head.)

 Surprisingly, we talked for a few minutes while he walked around my truck. I drove a Jeep pickup and had built an oak hunting box on the back. It had storage for my guns and gear and two dog boxes on the end. Many farmers commented that it looked like furniture. It was a curiosity and conversation starter, both good things when you’re knocking on a stranger’s door. I had holes in the dog doors for the pups to stick their heads out and not even this “Post It” guy, could resist scratching their ears. I told him that I’d been hunting ruffed grouse east of there and had a limit and was hoping to shoot some pheasants before I went home. He said he’d heard of grouse but never saw one. I showed him both red and gray phases and how to tell a cock from a hen. I said I’d be happy to clean a couple and leave them with him, but he declined. Soon it was time to ask and I could tell, he was having a hard time saying no. 

 “Well, I don’t allow hunting. I have three hired hands and I don’t even let them hunt. But I guess you could walk that slough to the south, down to the pond. You can probably get two roosters in there.” Critter was finally going to get out to play.

 Critter hunted well. There was a nice wide swath of grass, but not much else till we reached the dirt tank. A little brush and weeds along the east side and Critter was barreling through when a couple hens and a rooster flushed. I hurried the first shot wanting to knock him down before he crossed the neighbor’s fence, but I missed and immediately shot again. He fell a couple feet shy of the fence and Critter just about ran right through the barbed wire trying to get stopped. 

 Critter hunted most of the way back to the truck through what we had already walked still carrying the rooster. We were back in about a half hour with one bird. I found the owner behind the bins to say thank you and asked questions about his operation. He told me that the government bought surplus grain and then paid him something like .50 cents a bushel per year to store it. He said it wasn’t supposed to be stored for more than three years by contract. I don’t recall if the three years was for human consumption or livestock, but he said he wasn’t supposed to have it any longer. But the price stayed low, the government was paying $2.00 a bushel and it was worth less after it was stored than when it went in. Some of the corn had been in his bins for four years and no one was coming to get it. The government now had $4.00 a bushel in what might have been worthless corn. What a surprise.

I think he actually felt bad that I had only seen one rooster in his slough. He walked me back to my truck and said I could hunt a small patch of CRP across the road for my last rooster, just because he wanted to watch my pups. 

 I crossed the road with both of them and we circled down near the brushy creek. Of course they put up a rooster at the creek, and he just happened to fly across as I was swinging on him. The creek looked deep, but there was a beaver dam of corn stalks and willows that I thought I could cross. Boom! And the rooster tumbled. I saw him hit the ground running in an open patch of willows. The pups dove into the cold creek and were soon paddling back to my shore. They had been playing in puddles and shallow ponds, but I think this was the first time they couldn’t touch bottom.  This was followed by a lot of splashing, encouraging and stick throwing but even when Woogs made it all the way across once, she wouldn’t hunt and pranced along the bank waiting for us to follow.

 I was up to my knees in the soft mucky beaver dam and was lucky to make it half way without sinking to my waste. I didn‘t give a dam about the pheasant at this point and was just trying to get Woogs back. She didn’t have her sea legs yet, and didn’t like that sensation of not being able to touch bottom. 

 She finally sloshed close enough for me to reach her collar. Now, the three of us were balancing on the mushy ridge of mud and corn stalks that wasn’t built for this level of occupation. The two of them thoroughly soaked my upper half with mud, celebrating their reunion. 

 Back on dry land, I was happy to notice that none of this was visible from the house and we circled to the outside edge along picked corn. There just had to be another rooster walking into the CRP after feeding in the corn. About half way back Critter got birdy and then Woogs. They were running different birds and Critter flushed two roosters and hens just on the edge of range while I had my eye on my yellow pup. I didn’t shoot at Critter’s birds as I could see the grass moving a few feet in front of Woogs. This had to be another rooster. 

 Woogs was doing a good job working this bird. She followed scent and didn’t notice the bird rattling weeds just a few feet in front of her. I ran around to the front to cut it off and in a few seconds, there was a cackling rooster bursting from the grass just in front of Woogs nose. I hit this one hard and left the dogs to decide who was going to carry it. This wasn’t the first, or last time, I nonchalantly walked away from a pup carrying a bird. Why advertise to an audience, the indifference my pups showed in delivering to hand? 

 The farmer was only about a hundred yards away and waved. 

 Back at the truck, I thanked him profusely and then dropped the bomb. “I’m going to be in Iowa next week pheasant hunting. I’ll be trying to shoot a double limit of just pheasants this time. If I get my Iowa birds and have enough time left, can I come back and hunt again?” He suspected this was coming. 

 “If you already have an Iowa limit and you’re alone. You can come back. Let me give you a business card. I want you to stop at the house, but if I’m not home, park off the road, leave your keys in your rig and this card in your window. My hired men and neighbors know that if there’s a vehicle parked on the road, they just call the sheriff. If anyone checks your truck they better be able to see the card.”

I know a two bird limit of pheasants, even in Minnesota, isn’t bragging material. But these pups seemed to be. We took several limits of prairie grouse in the Nebraska sandhills in between this combination limit and our North Dakota combination limit. Just the previous weekend we shot enough Minnesota and Iowa ‘ruffs that I knew this combination was doable. And I had every reason to believe we would take the double limit of pheasants in Iowa and Minnesota in the upcoming week. Not many hunters with pups could put together that string, even in the best of years.   

Hey Guys! 
Several listeners have contacted me over the years with their hunt stories and just to say hi. I want you to know that I appreciate the positive feedback and also enjoy hearing about your hunts and plans. 

Some of you have sent me pictures of your dogs but unfortunately, I failed to rename them in my files so now I’m not sure which pictures go with who’s names. I’d like to post some of your pictures on my website but wouldn’t think of doing that without your permissions. If you could please get in touch with me via email at shepard.randy@yahoo.com or text me at 319-610-5906, I would like to at least associate your names with your dogs. 

And any of you listeners who would like me to set up a free page for your dogs, or just drop me a note to introduce yourselves, I’d be happy to hear from you. 
While I’m sharing my memory lapses, I met a listener from Atlanta in the sandhills last fall, or even the fall before? I’d really like to hear about your Wyoming sage grouse hunt. 

I believe the visitors at My Dog Hunts would appreciate seeing more than just my pictures and stories. I know I keep saying I’m working on the website but not much changes. I can’t just update pages without linking them to other pages that I’m still improving. Really, it won’t be long. 

One of the most popular posts I’ve done is the Upland Bird Forecast. I know every organization puts something out there, but I incorporated county and species distribution maps along with the state forecasts. I know having all those aids together makes it much easier for me to plan my out-of-state hunts. I sometimes have so many different screen tabs open, that I get lost before I even leave home. You can expect to see a friendlier upland bird hunting forecast, on My Dog Hunts, this fall.   

 Thanks for listening. And I hope these stories inspire you to hunt more species, in more states, more often.