Banner Crop
Last weekend's clients sent me the following pictures of the two crops from the grouse we harvested on Sunday, and the pictures are amazing. Grouse have been known to eat many different things, depending on their location. If they're near old apple orchards, you can expect apples to be a major food source at this time of year, and we all know that high bush cranberries, hawthorn berries and mountain ash berries are also highly sought after by feeding grouse.
But what if none of these food sources are readily present for some of those "deep woods" grouse? Well, their large menu selection just seems to get larger, as they also incorporate the green leaves of raspberry plants and fern tips (what is termed "salad" by grouse hunters), mushrooms, and the buds and seeds of many different types of trees (yellow and white birch, maple, and beech are most prevalent in northern New Hampshire and Vermont). As you can see, these birds had plenty of salad, but the one bird with the "all you can eat buffet" crop also had lots of those maple seeds (whirligigs) - it was undoubtedly loading up for the weather that we had last night and are currently experiencing today.
There have been no hard frosts as of yet, so there is still plenty of salad out there in the woods - if you're hunting in the next week or so up here, you might want to pay attention to some of those thicker "green" areas. There might just be a grouse in there getting its next meal.
