COUNTING CONVERTS
By: Jake McGinnis
- Barbara Bretting Non-Fiction Runner-up
E
ach autumn, when the woodcock have left the North Country and
the leaves are moldering away on the forest paths, I walk down an
old woods road that I have known for most of my life. It winds along a
hardwood ridge for a bit over a mile before emerging in a grassy meadow
bordered with raspberries and aspens, a boggy creek to the east. From
there, I generally continue to the south, into the aspens where the grouse
usually seem to be. It is a fairly long walk, an unhurried hike that will
take my French Brittany and me the better part of a day. I always slide
a water bottle into the game pouch on the back of my hunting vest and
usually a sandwich on a hard roll, too. During the course of a typical fall,
my hunting will be winding down for the year when I walk that old trail
back to the aspens. I always save this spot for last.
I’ve never bothered to calculate the average flush rate for a season
of grouse hunting in the Upper Midwest. Bird populations that fluctuate
over a ten-year cycle, a rapidly changing forest environment, and other
factors would make my math impossibly difficult. It would be skewed
by periods when I don’t get in the woods enough and would be limited
by my relatively small hunting area. Besides, I like autumn hikes and the
smell of wet dogs mixed with grouse feathers and burnt gunpowder. I’m
not much for statistics.
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Still, I can follow certain trends during the course of a season or
a period of years. Sometimes, a quick stroll through a good aspen tangle
will put up a dozen birds. In poor years, when the grouse are near the
bottom of their cycle, it can be downright dismal. Regardless of their
population swings, grouse numbers are usually best early in the season,
in September, when the leaves are thick and green and the birds are still
holding in coveys. Most of them will have hatched that spring, and flushes of four, five, even six birds at a time will be fairly normal. The shooting
is made difficult