Hunt Report: Our Minnesota Trip

Can you tell how dry it was from this pic?

After a somewhat disappointing launch of our ruffed grouse season in Maine, we were really looking forward to hitting Minnesota just right: the leaves down, the locals focused more on deer than birds and, not least, being in aspen central.

(By the way, 10 days between trips isn’t enough to actually accomplish anything at work….)

If you’re a grouse hunter and have never been to the upper Midwest, including the Walker area of Minnesota where we were, you are definitely missing out. Acre after acre after acre of aspens. It looks like bird paradise, and it is – which was one of our two major problems, believe it or not, on this trip. But we’ll get into that later.

Day 1: Half a Day In the Pines

We got to Minneapolis on a Friday morning, retrieved our guns and luggage, then headed north in our rental. About 3 hours and 45 minutes later we’re in the Walker area, and about 20 minutes after that we’re in our hunting gear getting maps at the Chippewa National Forest ranger station.

Seem like most of the gov’t folks were out or maybe gone for the day, so we got our maps, a brief orientation and hit the closest logging road we could find. Literally the first road we took off that road had a grouse at the end of it. It was coming out of some green roadside vegetation and crossing the road into some tall pines – the kind with no branches for the first 30 feet and then bushy at the top.

We promptly exited the vehicle and started hunting up the small hill where we saw the grouse, toward a stand of aspens behind the firs. We assumed that that’s where the grouse was headed but, as we would figure out too late to use it to our advantage, that wasn’t the case.

A few steps up the hill the grouse flushed about 15 yards ahead of Jay, an easy left to right crossing shot. But Jay didn’t shoot. Why the heck not? Well, he thought was a spruce grouse, which are somewhat common up there. It didn’t flush very hard, seem to have almost a pointed tail and was under tall pines – not spruce, but…. Brendan likewise wondered what species of chicken it was.

(By the way, if you’ve never seen a spruce grouse, it’s just about the dumbest – or most trusting bird – in the forest. You could easily kill one with a rock or a stick, if not your bare hands. Wonder what’s in all those spruce needles…. The birds taste bad, and are so dumb that at least one state (Maine ) prohibits shooting them.)

We figured out later that, sure enough, it was a ruffed grouse. Dumb.

We stomped around the aspen stand even though it was too big, and flushed a deer that sounded like a horse bashing through the woods, but never saw or heard another bird.

It also began to dawn through our enthusiasm that the woods were dry. Super dry. The leaves were down, very crunchy underfoot, and there was virtually zero green vegetation among the aspens. So no food for our feathered friends. The air temp was also pretty high, in the 60s.

Ideal Aspens, No Birds

We drove back to the main logging road, and further down we found a large stand of ideal aspens: forearm sized, dense, bisected here and there by logging roads with gravel.

We jumped out of the truck with great anticipation, but 50 yards in it was apparent to both of us that the woods were just too dry. They were empty – no tweety birds, no vegetation. The area couldn’t even support bugs let alone grouse. We gave it the old college try and then some, but there was literally nothing there.

Back at the truck, we figured those woods were too dry so all we had to do was find aspens on lower ground or with water around them. But way easier said than done since we were new to the area and because that country is so vast. Then again, a lot of that area is low and wet.

Here's the walking trail. Note the mature forest in the background.

With the light already fading, we decided to drive to a Hunter Walking Trail, which is exactly that: trails were hunters can walk and ATVs can’t go. Also, the trails are planted with clover, which the furry chickens like.

We of course had our guns, but at this point we’re basically just out for a hike, getting a feel for the land. After a bit, the trail we were on turned into a mostly-hard-mud road with tire tracks on it, so we figured some logging had to be going on in the area. Sure enough, we found a parcel that looked like it had been logged that summer, but no decent-sized aspens around.

In other words, we were in mature forest with a lot of tall firs, like 50 or so feet tall. It felt ridiculous to be trying to find grouse in those woods…yet we flushed three more birds in them! Brendan took two shots at one – he’d heard it running (dry leaves) and got ready for the flush.

All the birds were near the road and all were in tall pines. It was nuts!

We thought this was a sign that there were so many grouse in the local woods that they were even under these huge pines in this poor habitat. So when we found the right combination of stuff, it would be like a shooting gallery. We were right, but only partly so.

Next Up: Day 2 Hunt Report

Category: 2010-11 reports, Hunt reports, MN, Ruffed Grouse, SBH