NH Grouse Hunting Update: 10/14/2013
The weather in northern NH has remained a bit on the warm side for us bird hunters, but finally cooled off today. A front moved in last night, bringing with it some much needed moisture that helped with the scenting conditions tremendously for our pups this morning.
The numbers of birds moved each day seems to be the same - a little down compared to last year's action, but still fine nonetheless. The interesting thing to take away from the past week of hunting is where we've been finding most of our grouse - near road edges that have thick evergreen cover. This was certainly appropriate for today, where we had a steady misting of rain (sometimes more than that) all day, but it also worked well for us when it was positively too warm for grouse late last week and over the weekend. Grouse prefer areas like this to stay cool as well, and sometimes it seemed that there was a ten degree difference when we went in to the thick evergreens.
The numbers of birds moved each day seems to be the same - a little down compared to last year's action, but still fine nonetheless. The interesting thing to take away from the past week of hunting is where we've been finding most of our grouse - near road edges that have thick evergreen cover. This was certainly appropriate for today, where we had a steady misting of rain (sometimes more than that) all day, but it also worked well for us when it was positively too warm for grouse late last week and over the weekend. Grouse prefer areas like this to stay cool as well, and sometimes it seemed that there was a ten degree difference when we went in to the thick evergreens.
Still, just because we find them, it doesn't mean that we bag them - the grouse have been pulling out all of the stops so far this year - running out of points, disappearing like ghosts, and even gliding away nearly unheard. Check out this video from today's action and you'll get an idea of the grouse hunter's plight, even when we know exactly where they are!
