Life with Sharptails

Summer still held the high plains. A few upper leaves had turned yellow on the cottonwoods along the rivers, and there was a hint of red in the knee-high wild roses in the coulees, but we had to look closely to notice the yellow or red amid the green leaves. The air felt warm and almost humid, with dew clinging to the grass under the berry thickets.
    That shady grass is where sharptails live in early September. An observant hunter can tell the birds are probably somewhere near from tunnels in the grass, made by coveys of grouse pushing their way into the shade. This is when sharptails really hold for a dog and make even mediocre wingshots feel like Annie Oakley.
    The lean black Labrador trotted into a chokecherry thicket full of “chicken tracks,” as locals call them, and we could hear his eager progress and see the slight shaking of leaves along his path. Then the sound turned into a mixture of rushes along with clucking rather like a barnyard chicken’s. The leaves in one part of the patch shook as if from an internal wind, and a sharptail beat its way upward through the leaves and into the air. A shotgun boomed, and the bird fell back through the leaves, a few feathers slowly following. Three more grouse flew from the shady side of the cherry patch, and two shotguns boomed and two birds fell.
    The men—one young and one old—eased forward as the last of the covey flushed from the far end of the thicket, too far away to shoot. The dog pushed them upward anyway, nose too full of bird smell and ears too full of booming shotguns to care about mere wingshooters. Six grouse sailed down the draw, alternately flapping and sailing, clucking until they landed in the rosebushes about 150 yards downhill.
    By then the dog had regained his composure and started bringing dead grouse to the young hunter. The young man noticed a touch of purple on the first grouse’s beak, and the bird’s crop felt as if it were filled with light birdshot, the pits of chokecherries.
    The other hunter stood and watched, the butt of his old pumpgun on the ground and the barrel held in his left hand. He took a pipe from a shirt pocket and put it in his teeth, then lit the pipe with a flip-top lighter. “Not bad shooting, kid,” he said. “Pick up those chickens, and then I’ll show you something.”
    And he did. After the pipe went out—he never could keep it going very long, even after a half-century of practice—he handed the young man his shotgun, then walked to the edge of the thicket and used his pocketknife to cut a dead branch a little more than an inch in diameter and two feet long. He walked down the coulee along the edge of the rosebushes, one end of the stick in his right hand. The young man carried the shotguns and kept the dog at heel.
    Soon a grouse rose from the rosebushes perhaps 30 yards away. The old man cocked his right arm, and then took a few steps forward and almost stepped on another grouse. It flew low across the roses, and the old man threw the stick sidearm, whirling it through the air like a slow boomerang. The stick whirled into the grouse and both fell. The dog rushed after the bird. The grouse fluttered a little in the dog’s mouth, but by the time it was dropped in the young man’s hand it lay completely still.
    “That’s the way the old Indian women did it when men were out hunting big stuff.” By this time the old man had the pipe going again and was looking down the draw, maybe toward the past. The young man could imagine the old man’s face on an Indian-head penny.
    The young man was me almost 40 years ago on a reservation in Montana. The old man was my then-wife’s grandfather Ben. That was the only time he ever demonstrated grouse hunting with a stick. For the first two years I hunted with him he never missed with a shotgun, either. After that his eyes grew dimmer and he’d miss now and then, making him mad.
     These days that reservation is known for its upland shooting, but back then we never saw another bird hunter. The other members of the tribe hunted deer, a much more cost-effective use of a box of ammunition, so Ben and I pretty much had the bird hunting to ourselves. I learned a lot about sharptails and other things.
    Last fall in early November some friends and I walked near a fenceline between a grainfield and a lightly grazed cow pasture in western South Dakota. We were hunting pheasants but saw far more sharp-tailed grouse. The sharptails rose out of the grass and stubble far out of shotgun range, clucking and flapping and sailing somewhere else. We never even took a shot at a grouse, though we killed several wild pheasants, those supposedly wily birds.
    In several decades of sharptail hunting that’s the only certainty I’ve found: The birds will hold almost as tightly as Leghorns in early September, and in November they’ll flush so wildly that some hunters wish for a .270 instead of a 12-gauge.
    If hunters think of sharptails at all, they consider them part of the wide-open West, when in reality they’re mostly a northern bird. They may live in the most varied habitat of any North American grouse. I have hunted sharptails from the Sandhills of Nebraska, where they live in tall grass alongside greater prairie chickens, to the “aspen parklands” of Alberta, where the high plains mingle with the southern edge of the North Woods and sharptails and ruffed grouse often share the same patches of aspens. In western Montana I’ve flushed sharptails and blue grouse from the same foothill conifers. Sharptails also live in the corn country of eastern South Dakota and even western Quebec. In the north they extend to Alaska and the Northwest Territories, almost all the way to the Arctic Ocean. I’ve encountered them in the Territories, out on the ptarmigan tundra, while carrying a .270 for caribou.
    But the heart of sharptail country is that part of the northern plains where there’s enough precipitation to grow brush in the draws. While sharptails require some grassland, they really thrive where brush and grass mix, especially where part of the grass comes in the form of wheat. One of the surest bets in sharptail hunting is a stubblefield on top of what’s known as a “bench,” a prairie plateau with brushy coulees dropping off the sides. Look in those coulees in September and October about mid-morning on a nice day, and if there are any sharptails around, that’s where they’ll be, their crops stuffed with grain.
     If you can’t stand waiting until mid-morning and simply must be out at dawn, the birds will still be in the stubble, especially the corners and dips where a combine’s header can’t get right down on the ground. Their heads poke out of the grass like periscopes on a yellow sea, and getting close is tougher than when they’re resting in shady brush—and becomes even tougher as summer turns to fall.
    The one thing that can keep them in brush past early October is a good crop of buffaloberries. A few falls ago my wife, Eileen, and I happened to be in eastern Montana for the deer season opener, the last week of October. By that time pheasant season had started, and most sharptail hunters had switched to roosters. But this year had a bumper crop of buffaloberries and sharptails and a long Indian summer. Buffaloberry bushes have three things sharptails really like: small thorns that discourage predators; gray-green leaves that stay on year-round; and orange-red berries that, like apples, turn sweet only after the first frosts.
    Deer like buffaloberry patches too. That year I carried a century-old Daly-Sauer Drilling with outside hammers—the shotgun barrels 12-gauge and the rifle barrel .30-30. The first morning I was working up a draw containing several buffaloberry thickets when a covey of sharptails flushed from a sidehill and flew to a grassy knob a quarter-mile away. This seemed to be normal for late October, when sharptails loaf more on ridgetops than under shady brush, so I stalked the knob and eased over the top very quietly.
    When sharptails are knob-sitting, the farthest bird tends to flush as you top the hill, the rest of the covey hidden by the hill’s curve. When one bird got up 40 yards away, I let it go. Another flushed a little closer, and I hit it with the right barrel but not very well. It set its wings and glided 100 yards downhill into a small buffaloberry patch. Since this was supposed to partly be a deer hunt, the bird dog was back in the pickup, almost a mile away, so I became my own retriever, reloading and easing up to the berry patch. Whereupon another covey of sharptails flushed from the shady side and the old gun dropped a bird. I picked up this bird, and then pushed my way into the thorny thicket. Soon I heard a hard flapping, the “wounded” grouse fluttering to death. It lay on its back, white belly shining in the sun as if to help a dogless hunter. We flushed sharptails from the buffaloberries for three days and never did kill a deer.
    Eventually, however, no matter how nice the fall, sharptails grow wild and crazy. The only thing making them really huntable then is snow and cold. Then they’ll abandon the grassy ridges for brush and trees, though they’ll start roosting in the tops of the bushes, not underneath. Here they can be essentially driven by several hunters surrounding a big patch of cover. Rarely is a bird killed on the flush—they get up too far out—but they often will swing over another hunter. The shots are much like those at driven pheasants, and the Annie Oakley pride built in September tends to fade fairly quickly in December.
    Sharptails can also just disappear anytime from September into December. They’re strong fliers, with dark, blood-filled breast muscles, and they live in large territories. If people (or coyotes, or rough-legged hawks) harass them too much, they’re likely to fly someplace else.
    One fall I had permission to hunt a local ranch for both birds and big game. The sides of one small valley were cut by a dozen draws filled with sagebrush and Rocky Mountain juniper. One November day this looked like a good place to find a mule deer. The morning dawned foggy, a rarity in Montana, and as I hunted from draw to draw, easing up on each ridge to carefully scan below me, I flushed dozens of sharptails. They probably wouldn’t have allowed me to approach so closely without the fog.
    Unfortunately, this was before I had the Drilling, and I could only watch the birds fly off into the fog, clucking all the way. A couple of days later (theoretically allowing them to calm down) I took a shotgun and my dog into the same hills. I never saw a sharptail, and in fact I never found them again that fall—something that happens occasionally with late-fall birds.
    Part of this mystery has to be the tendency of many prairie birds, from Huns to sage grouse, to gather into big bunches with the contraction of early season cover. Sharptails do this too, and one gray late-November day Ben and I went out after the first snow on one of those general hunting expeditions after anything edible, whether rutting deer, ducks just down from Canada or long-range sharptails.
    We jumped a couple of farm ponds, taking a half-dozen mallards, but didn’t see any deer or sharptails. Ben said he knew of one big coulee where sharptails sometimes went at this time of year, so we headed that way. By then he was getting very old. He parked the pickup in a draw a few hundred yards from a ridge and told me to leave him in the pickup with the dog, hike over to the ridge with my shotgun and ease over the top. So I did, hearing the dog whining between each crunching step on the crusted snow.
    From the ridgetop I could see down into an expanse of low rosebushes, the leaves long gone, the snowy ground semi-visible between the thin branches. The gray sky hung low, daylight already starting to fail at 4 in the afternoon, and a dark shadow moved slowly through the brush like a wide carpet. The moment I started toward the carpet at least 200 sharptails rose into the air, not in the scattered flush of late summer but utterly coordinated, like a flock of huge sparrows. In that near-winter stillness the sound of clucks and wingbeats grew into something like a miniature windstorm, and then slowly faded as all the sharptails at that end of the earth flew north toward a dim horizon. I watched for a long time, until in the fading light they disappeared against the sky.

John Barsness lives in southwestern Montana with his wife—novelist and cooking writer Eileen Clarke—and his Labrador-and-English-setter mix, Gideon. He’s written seven books, including Western Skies, a collection of stories about wingshooting the West, and Shotguns For Wingshooting. He also is a staff writer for several magazines, including American Rifleman, Guns and Sports Afield.