Hunting sharptail grouse in the sandhills of Nebraska and southern South Dakota.
SHARPTAILS & SHARPTAILS
Through a couple of articles I had written for Field & Stream Magazine, I met a fellow upland bird hunter from Kansas, Larry. Phillipsburg, Kansas. There, now he’ll know I’m talking about him. It took a couple of trips with Larry to southeast Minnesota and north east Iowa, ruffed grouse hunting, to convince me to forgo the early September opened of ruffed grouse season to meet him in the sandhills of Nebraska to hunt sharptailed grouse and prairie chickens.
We were to meet in Thedford, Nebraska on the first Monday of the prairie grouse season, and Larry expected me there at noon. At the time I was dating a girl who didn’t think that punctuality was important when meeting a fellow hunter, so she planned that we would spend the weekend camping on the north shore of lake Superior. It was almost dark when we found a vacant camp site at a lake shore camp that Lynn was familiar with. I’m sure that familiarity had something to do with a previous boyfriend.
I suppose some conflict is to be expected when we had just picked up an “erects itself tent” from REI just before we left town. You can imagine how we bonded, with my need to prove that I could put up a damn four man tent without reading the instructions, as long as my sleep partner would direct a little light on the subject at hand. But oh no, she left me fumbling in the dark while she insisted on training the flashlight on the instructions. All the while bombarding me with unsolicited opinions. She said that if I didn’t stop throwing essential parts into the bushes, there wouldn’t be enough tent left to make a cheap umbrella.
I was certain that if there was any hope that Lynn and I would continue our fumbling later that night in the sleeping bag, I should leave her to get ready for bed and go investigate the roar of five foot waves crashing against the shore. I passed a couple of guys camping near us who were stoking their pit fire.
On my return, I noticed they had turned their chairs away from the fire, and towards our tent. They were concentrating intently on a silhouette in our tent, backlit by a Coleman lantern. Lynn had said she was an experienced tent camper. Either she wasn’t aware of the burlesque stage qualities of a woman, undressing in a night lit tent, or she was anticipating that her morning camp would be carpeted with dollar bills.
The guys gave me a sheepish look when they noticed me returning and I just smiled back at them.
We arrived back in Minneapolis just after midnight Sunday, and I left for my appointment with Larry at 3:00a.m.
I shot my fiurst sharptail grouse in Nebraska about 35 years ago. Since then, I’ve hunted sharptails in North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota. A friend suggested to me the other day, that maybe I should be doing podcasts on more recent dual limits that I’ve taken. That some people might think that any information I might give on hunts from the 1980s to early 2000’s might be outdated. But I can tell you, the craft of upland bird hunting, hasn’t changed in the last 50 years. There aren’t any new shortcuts to becoming a good bird hunter.
The white bread, skim milk, low cal, home boy, isn’t going to become the best upland bird hunter in the country, because of some new information he picked up on the internet. The most important aspect of being a good bird hunter is where you park your truck. Bespoke guns, fancy clothes and the best bird dogs can’t make birds magically appear where they don’t live.
To say that I was under-whelmed by the apparent lack of bird holding cover in western Nebraska would be an understatement. By my standards of bird habitat from hunting in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, the Sandhills was a barren desolate landscape. After many years of pursuing ruffed grouse in the timbered hills of Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota and pheasants in Iowa’s chest high sloughs and tight creek bottoms, the Nebraska Sandhills looked like a good place for birds to go to die. I was conditioned to tight places, close shots and short retrieves. Not an endless sea of sparse, knee high grass.
I couldn’t have been more wrong in observation or enthusiasm. After just a few days of hunting prairie grouse, I discovered an amazing number of birds and an appreciation for the Sandhills that’s kept me returning every season for nearly 30 years. I would sooner miss a paycheck than a season of prairie grouse. As a matter of fact, I occasionally have.
It seems that sharptails are the bastard child of the prairies. In North Dakota they are often referred to as “flying carp”. Early settlers called prairie chickens “yellow legs” and square tails” they showed no special affection for sharptails.
Valentine, Nebraska is on the northern edge of the Sandhills. Stretching south for 100 miles is a vast sea of rolling and sometimes choppy hills and flat valleys with and without water. There were pockets of bare sand eroded near the tops of the steepest hills that didn’t make sense to someone from a wetter, calmer climate, until I overheard a family conversation in small café where they spoke of grouse hunting, blowouts and meadows. Suddenly the sand pockets in the choppy hills that I had assumed were caused by water erosion had a different origin. Wind. The flat valleys were referred to by the locals as meadows.
I was introduced to prairie grouse hunting by Larry, from Phillipsburg, Kansas. Larry and a friend had traveled to Northeast Iowa for a couple of seasons to hunt ruffed grouse with me after reading an article I had written in Field & Stream. He finally convinced me to skip a few days of ruffed grouse hunting to join him in the Nebraska Sandhills for prairie grouse hunting. I’m so grateful for that introduction. I have missed many seasons of ruffed grouse hunting since that first trip, but never a season in the Sandhills.
On my first hunt in the Sandhills we apparently experienced unseasonably warm conditions. Morning lows were in the 60’s and by noon each day the temperature had climbed into the 80’s. Had we been moving birds all day, I would have continued hunting, but after two full days I realized that we could count all the birds we flushed after noon, on one hand. On the third afternoon, we agreed to drive north to the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge to do some scouting.
Once within the Refuge, we drove by rounder sandhills and more meadows, some with cottonwood lined lakes and cattail marshes. Many of the higher slopes on the south sides of the lakes were lined with dense plum thickets.
We turned off the highway and meandered down a narrow two track that we would later know as “Windmill Road“. At the end, we found a couple of older hunters cleaning grouse in the water tank. Cleaning a lot of grouse. And the ground around the tank was literally carpeted with feathers! There were more feathers on the ground and cleaned carcasses in the tank than we had seen in nearly three days of hunting!
The good old boys from Valentine were very friendly and helpful. They said the rest of their party was hunting up on the skyline and needed a few more birds to fill their limits. They were younger hunters with something to prove. The old boys had been hunting grouse for their entire lives and another grouse more or less didn’t mean much to them anymore. They were happy to spend the warmest part of the day relaxing on the tailgate and occasionally stirring over to the water tank to clean another bird.
There was a lot of shooting in that range of hills and we could occasionally see a flock of grouse flying in front of or behind the line of guns. I was amazed at the number of birds they had shot and were continuing to shoot at when we had been seeing perhaps a dozen birds a day just 30 miles south of there.
The old boys suggested that we drive back to the highway and hunt the first range of hills to the east. They said it was a short range, only about a mile deep, so must hunters skipped it, and their party hadn’t hunted it all year. They were certain we would find shooting there.
They were right! We found more birds in that short range of hills in just an hour, than we flushed in 2-½ days at Halsey Taylor. Singles and pairs. Small groups and sometimes in the teens. I have no idea just how many birds we moved but it was a bunch. Larry and I each finished our limits and continued to explore until nearly dark. When we returned to our rig, there was a note on the windshield.
“Heard the shooting. Hope you had fun! The Good Old Boys from Valentine” Good old boys indeed!
All the way back to the Hotel and till sleep, poor Larry had to listen to me plan out loud how I could hunt Nebraska and South Dakota in the same day as I did Iowa and Minnesota at home. How I could shoot up to six grouse a day. I guess the opportunity wasn’t as intriguing to Larry as he had only a few hour’s drive to the Sandhills. It was 12 hours one way from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Without benefit time, I didn’t get paid while I was out hunting and there were bills waiting for me when I returned home. I needed more justification for the sacrifice of hunting that far from home than a simple three-bird limit in Nebraska.
This was our last day hunting together as Larry had to return home. I was still two birds short of my possession limit so I stopped back at the Refuge on my way home to see if the afternoon before was a fluke or there really were that many more birds there.
I shot my two birds in little time. Again, I don’t know how many birds I saw but it was a lot for so short a time. I heard shooting from a north range of hills and watched perhaps 20 grouse fly across the wide meadow straight for the hill I was on. I had read that sharptails will sometimes veer towards a hunter who crouches and this flock did exactly that. The entire flock settled in within gun range. The experience felt more like duck hunting that anything else and I hesitated to shoot. It always seemed almost mean to me, to scare the bejeebers out of that many birds when you could only shoot a few. But shoot I did. As I stood, the entire flock flushed around me. I took a pair arcing to my left and was struck by the noise and commotion of so many game birds flushing so near. It had been back in the ‘70’s since anything like this had happened to me yet unlike with pheasants, every bird was a potential target!
When I picked up the two dead birds I discovered that I had shot a sharptail and a chicken from the same flock.
Back in the 80’s and 90’s I hunted prairie grouse and pheasants on the Rosebud Reservation in Todd County, South Dakota. The license was inexpensive and unlike the South Dakota state license, the reservation license was good for the entire year. I had many wonderful hunts there but the reservation regulations have changed and now require a native Indian guide for all hunting. With that change, I never returned and never will.
October 1988
It’s a long overnight haul from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Valentine, Nebraska. In the wee a.m. hours I pulled off the road near Murdo, South Dakota and slept for a few hours. In those days even a non-resident license was a formidable expense let alone Motel stays. I had little money and no paid time off so I hunted only weekends and planned to make the most of them. Hunt two states each day and try to bring four limits of birds home. I also tried to finish on Sunday by noon as even then I wouldn’t be home till midnight.
I didn’t wake as early as I wanted, but I learned years earlier it was better to get a few hours more sleep and hunt harder and smarter. A few years earlier I got a late start hunting ruffed grouse in Minnesota and still managed a five bird limit by 1:00 and a three bird limit that same afternoon in Iowa. I also learned that we all have some good days and some bad days and that has little to do with the number of hours you have available to hunt. What’s most important is how you hunt those hours and how the hunting Gods feel about you. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I got off me foundry job at 2:00 a.m. packed guns and dogs, picked up a buddy by 4:00 and hunted ducks, ‘ruffs and woodcock till dark, drove two hours home, showered bar hopped and did it all over again on Sunday.
In those younger days, we rested upright at work after we had our money made. The work was chipping and grinding. Any of you who have spent time in a large casting foundry know just how tough that work is. That may go along ways to explaining why we’re still a little rough around the edges 30 years later.
I since learned that five hours of sleep is not a waste of time. I would like to say that I shot better with sleep but that has not been the case. I did the best shooting of my life back then. I recall when a friend Del Willard, called on New Years eve day for a southern Iowa quail hunt on New Years. I have no idea what he was thinking. Neither of us owned a dog at that time and Iowa’s bobwhites had taken a real hit the past winter and spring. I knew quail hunters with presumably good dogs who were seeing few quail.
I stopped at a convenience store for grub snacks on my way home at about 4:00 a.m. as Del pulled in to top off his tank before picking me up. It took a few seconds for him to realize that a leather coat and disco pants weren’t my normal hunting attire. He proclaimed rather loudly that he wasn’t hunting with a guy who was still drunk and sleepless from the night before! I assured him I would be dressed by the time he picked me up, but he still whined for most of the three hour drive.
I shot a limit of 8 quail and a rooster pheasant with 9 shells, by noon. Del finished his 8 bird limit shortly after and we stayed till dark shooting a few cottontails. For as long as I can remember, the guys I hunted with always hunted all day. When we took a limit of one animal, we simply switched to another. It was one of those wonderful days that we could tell anyone who asked about and to a person they all thought we were lying.
I was hunting the same ridge at the Refuge as the previous year, in a long sleeved shirt and a Bob Allen vest, with a brisk wind at my back. There’s a sense about being in strange geography with miles and miles of vista and unfamiliar opportunity before you. The sense that comes from a moderate understanding of your quarry and the confidence to determine what looks good and what looks better with the crest of each rise. In a wild and desolate place with a gun in your hands and permission to use it. You have a license in your pocket that says you can shoot if you want to, but there’s much more than that. There’s a code. A code that says, “yes, you can shoot, but you must also gather, clean, cook and eat what you kill“. The code is as ancient as mankind, as Neanderthal as fire and spears, and as modern as game laws and bag limits. And you gladly accept this as your code every time you carry a loaded gun with a hunting license in your pocket.
A single sharptail flushed at my feet which I already realized in my limited experience, as a rarity. The bird see-sawed in flight to about 20 yards when I shot it. A bird tumbling from the sky amidst loose feathers, the echo of a gun shot and the smell of burned powder all make for one of the sweeter moments in life once you realize just how short life may be and how uninspiring your life’s work has been. Perhaps not as moving, but still pretty damn rewarding before that day comes as well.
With a plump warm bird in my game pouch and an increasingly cold and pushy wind at my back, I hiked on. The western sky was growing darker and I could see rain on the distant horizon. If I didn’t finish my limit soon, I wouldn’t know what to expect from these foreign birds in a winter like storm. And winter like storm it was becoming. The temperature was rapidly dropping and I was thankful that prairie grouse hunting was something that you do with the wind at your back, but it would surely be a long, cold, jaunt back to my truck.
After an hour, I realized I was working these hills a lot more thoroughly than grouse hunting requires as these birds seldom sit as tight as pheasants, more often flushing out of range. In all of my hunting I prefer to shoot my birds without driving to different locations. I like to get out and hunt till dark or until I have my limit. That was one of the most appealing aspects of hunting the Sandhills. I could walk all day, miles and miles and miles with no thought to acres or hours. There were places where it was nine miles between two tracks. Nothing but a few fences and ranges of hills occasionally separated by a meadow. And if you guess correctly, you just might find a bird or two on the backside.
Then, ahead and below me, was a familiar tree. A small scrub willow in a pocket where you would expect to find water but there was none. Only the grass was slightly taller and thicker than the surroundings. The only time I was here before, I flushed a few grouse near that pocket and now my hopes were high. A firm grip on the stock with my right hand and a loose palm clasp on the forearm with my left. At a flush, I would more swat the forearm into position than raise and swing it and by the time the stock reached my cheek I would tighten my grip, pull the butt into my shoulder and pull the trigger. I have confidence that the lead is right once my cheek is tight on the stock and if not quiet perfect there’s still a second barrel for adjustment. Hesitation means I’m analyzing and that’s when I miss. Shooting thousands of shells through the same gun, your only gun, is how you become that automatic. Only a hen pheasant, distance or an unsafe background stops the trigger pull.
There was a saddle connecting the higher hills to this pocket and then dropped off to wimpy hills and a miles long meadow. As I walked the swing of the saddle a pair of sharp tails flushed 30 yards ahead. I missed with the first shot but dropped one bird decisively with the second barrel. I kept my eye on the clump of grass where the bird fell and soon had the damp grouse in hand. As I was slipping the grouse into my game bag, another pair of grouse flushed below the saddle, sailing towards the far meadow. I swung hard and the bird folded in a stream of wind tossed feathers. It was an easy downhill retrieve and I realized the extent that the weather had changed when I turned toward the truck.
My vest and shirt were soaked to the point that I had to hunch my shoulders to keep the cold off my back. Once I crested the ridge I felt the full force of the November wind that just moments ago had been urging me deeper into the Sandhills. There was a light mixture of sleet in the rain but it was mostly the cold rain that felt miserable.
It was only a mile and a half back to my truck, but it was a miserable mile and a half. I was soaked completely through front and back in the first couple hundred yards. I walked staring at my boot tops to shelter my eyes from the driven sleet and alternated hands holding the shotgun with the off hand in a pocket.
Staring at your bootlaces while you walk doesn’t lead a straight path. You have no idea just how irregular your path is if you don’t watch where you’re going. The undulating hills didn’t help. You wouldn’t believe how much you wander till you look up and realize that only 1/3 of your steps are true. A mile and half becomes three so you turn your side to the wind and abandon the straight path to the truck for the nearer road. At least the edge of the pavement would keep me straight without looking up.
By the time I got to the highway, my shirt sleeves and pants were coated with ice. I was tough, but this was worse than uncomfortable. The pavement was also coated with ice so I walked on the sandy shoulder to keep from slipping. A passing semi splattered me with dirty mist which soon froze to my already crisp clothes. I was still a quarter mile from my pickup when a car passed. I couldn’t help but imagine what they were thinking about this underdressed, Iowa ice man walking down the shoulder in a near blizzard.
I also remember thinking, “They don’t know.” They don’t know that I have a limit of sharptails in my coat that are warming me with the pride that comes from a tough hunt.
It wasn’t until I reached my truck that I realized my problems weren’t over. I had reloaded my gun before retrieving the last grouse in case I had a runner, and had forgotten to unload. Now my entire gun except the receiver where I had been holding it, was covered with ice. Not just a little ice but at least an eighth of an inch. I couldn’t move the barrel release lever or the safety. I took a shot shell out of my pocket and chipped away for a few seconds, but my hands were so cold, I could barely hold onto the shell. Then I had a McGyver moment. I realized the solution was simple. I only needed to clear the safety and trigger. I could then shoot the gun and the recoil should shatter the ice from my gun.
I firmly held the gun pointed up and away from my body, checked both ways for traffic, turned my head, and pulled the trigger. I wish I could describe how the ice shattered from the barrels and receiver of the Superposed, but I had my eyes closed. But I’m sure it would have made a cool picture as I could feel the ice crystals splattering against my clothes and hear them crinkling onto the ground.
If you’ve never returned to your truck, encased in ice, with boots overflowing with cold water, bloody, scratched, ripped, torn and tired, with snow packed in every wrinkle of your outerwear or so hot and thirsty that you weighed what you once considered a wonderful outdoor life against the agony of one more step or minute without water, then you can’t really appreciate a limit of birds.
Acting against the reality of my wallet, I checked into a Mom & Pop motel in Valentine for a hot shower and a change of clothes. I ate a junk food lunch and listened to sleet ping against the window while watching the lunacy of Soap Operas. About an hour later, I realized the sleet had stopped and the sky was beginning to clear.
In dry gear, I followed the signs through downtown Valentine directing me to Mission, South Dakota. I then drove from Mission to Rosebud and the office of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Department of Natural Resources where I met Noble Jones. I explained that I was hunting the reservation for the first time and would appreciate information on trespass and directions to any available public hunting.
Noble drew me a map of several center pivots, pastures and shelterbelts that he thought would hold birds and suggested Antelope Lake if all else failed.
I opted for a pivot of alfalfa and shot my first South Dakota sharp tail within a hundred yards of my truck and thought this was going to be easy with no hills. But the alfalfa was thick and tall, it wasn’t going to be easy finding downed birds in this stuff. I had to swing my gun barrel back and forth to clear the bushy tops so I could find feathers or the bird. I eventually found the bird and heard shooting just over the rise.
I found Noble and a partner hunting grouse themselves. All of the bird talk must have gotten to them as well. They had a couple of grouse between them and we talked for a few minutes. They loved living in that country as much as I loved hunting there.
I circled the outside edge of the field with a few wild flushes on my way back to my truck when a pair flushed within range near the road and I had my fifth grouse of the day. Just one bird short of a two state limit.
At my truck, I had a low tire. Okay, it was flat. Wasting precious hunting time changing the tire wasn‘t so bad as I watched a lone sharptail cross the road a few hundred yards behind my truck into some thin prairie pasture that I was told I could hunt. After putting the tools away, I loaded my shotgun and followed the bird. The grass was thin and the pasture had gentle folds with no hills and hardly any cover. If I hadn’t just minutes ago watched a grouse walk into this field, it would have been the last place I would have looked for one. But a few hundred yards in, the grass grew heavier and slightly taller. I noticed a gentle rise just ahead and suddenly there were a half dozen clucking sharptail grouse in the air!
Sharp tails don’t make much noise fighting their way off the ground like pheasants do. They just seem to noiselessly appear, several feet above the grass, in full flight.
I hit a crossing bird hard and my first day of bird hunting in South Dakota was over in just a couple of afternoon hours, with a three bird limit of sharptails to go with my three bird limit of Nebraska sharptails that same mourning.
Over the years I‘ve duplicated that same double limit many times including once in western North Dakota and South Dakota. In Nebraska and South Dakota where most of the double limits consisted of at least some prairie chickens.
Then one opening day in Nebraska my self-rescue record was broken by a few hunters who insisted on pulling my truck out of a gut dragging, muddy rut. They were first time prairie grouse hunters from Grand Island, Nebraska and I offered to hunt with them to show them what little I thought I understood about prairie grouse. I took a picture of a father and son with their shorthair and first sharptail, which I mailed to them when I arrived at home. Soon after the photo, they begged off, fearing they were ruining my hunting with their ranging pointers. I met up with them that evening at the campground where they had a couple of grouse each and I happened to have shot another double limit, that this time consisted of exactly three sharptails and three chickens. The species were not divided equally by state, but that did present a new challenge to prairie grouse hunting that I hadn’t previously considered. Just chickens from one state and just sharptails from the other.
My, that would be a tough hunt.