Upland Hunting:

Reservation for a Sharptail

To the pioneers, upland hunting didn’t mean the
same as it does today. As they moved west they found
the plains covered with birds other than the quail,
pheasant, and Ruffed grouse we think of. The sky
would often be darkened by flocks of prairie chickens
and sharptail grouse. If you know where and when to go,
you can still find quality hunting for these birds
of the grasslands.

It was raining in Gettysburg. Not your typical gentle fall rain. The droplets were small enough to be gentle. But after driving on the wind across the full 400 miles of Wyoming’s short-grass prairie, then making the long slide down the Black Hills to this small western South Dakota town (“Gettysburg,” says the highway sign, “where the battle wasn’t”), the drops were arrow-like in their intensity, almost hard and cold enough to be hail.

It had been 94 degrees and sunny the day before. Today it was 34 and threatening a blizzard. But that’s the high plains for you.

We’d come out for some unique upland hunting - early season sharptailed grouse. The Sioux, in South Dakota, usually open their season a week or so before regular upland hunting begins statewide. The Cheyenne River Reservation, during this first week, can offer exceptional gunning.

True, the cover is still quite thick. But so, too, are the coveys. And because the sharptail grouse haven’t been pushed much, the chickens (in South Dakota, anything with feathers that lives in the grass and isn’t a pheasant, is a chicken) are a little less wild and spooky than they’ll become later in the year.

Somebody---probably Steve Nelson, it’s the kind of thing he would come up with---wanted to know if I thought my shells would rust. While nontoxic shot isn’t mandated in the uplands, Friend Wife and I were shooting steel, much to the amusement of some others in the upland hunting party. There’s growing pressure to switch to nontoxic shot for all upland hunting, and we were curious about how it performs on birds other than waterfowl.

Our handloads were assembled with zinc-plated #3 shot, and we’d wax-sealed the crimps, making the loads rust safe even through full immersion. A little old high-plains blizzard wouldn’t affect them at all.

Lead or steel, however, wouldn’t matter so long as we were stoking caffeine instead of walking the tall grass. Soon enough someone suggested we stop fooling around and brace the weather, so we piled out of the café and into the trucks.

There were enough of us to make quite a pile on this upland hunting trip. Besides Friend Wife and me, there were some folks from the South Dakota tourism department, and a film crew for an outdoor television show. My old buddy Thayne Smith and his wife were there to gun in front of the camera, and grasslands guide Chuck Krause, and local hunter Kris Nafziger with his black lab. And Bob Tinker, up from Pierre with his setters just to add a note of class in the canine department.

Friend Wife and I wondered about the crowd. We were used to the thick Ruffed grouse coverts of the East, where even three guns is often two too many, and to the bobwhite country of the South, where both hunters and birds are gentlemen. Surely, we whispered to each other, this babble in arms, of which we were a part, would scare every bird in the western half of the state.

But not to worry. Have you seen that country? Have you seen the undulating hills covered with gramma and blue stem, broken only by the straight-line anomaly of wheat stubble? Have you seen the long, sere country stretching on to new horizons, broken now and again by a wire fence rusting into the grass? Seen the sky scrubbed clean by the wind merging with the suntan of the dried grasses, with the orange of hunting vests the only visual break? When you’re sweeping a ranch the size of Rhode Island, and can’t tell where the land ends and the sky begins, then three guns, or even 30, is none too many.

But where, in these endless miles of nothingness, would we find birds? Everybody knew where they’d normally be, where they should be. But the unseasonable weather made things far from normal for upland hunting.

The day before, the boys with the video gear had found sharptail grouse in the bottoms, and wanted to try there again. But no, somebody said, given the wind and rain, we’d find them sheltered under the hill crests. Yet another insisted we look for them huddled under what scant cover existed—occasional dwarf cedars, buffalo berry bushes, and round bales near cultivated patches.

I held my peace, having no opinion to offer. But I knew we’d never find them if we didn’t go look. And I finally said so. And everybody agreed. So we formed a skirmish line; four dogs and a dozen or so guns, sweeping the prairie in search of a mottled brown bird about the size of a hen pheasant. And we found them, all right. Single sharptails scattered on south-facing hillsides, spooky as all get out. The weather had them more than skittish, and they were flushing wild and well out of range.

Time to rethink our strategy for this upland hunting trip. Maybe we needed to break up into smaller groups? The rain had quit by then, the wind had flattened below gale force, and the birds should be looking for more open spots where they could dry their wings. We split up and worked different sections in smaller groups. That helped. We were at least getting closer to the birds. Not what I would call in range, exactly, not with the wind and the speed of the birds and those long vistas that destroy your ability to judge distance. But the others were firing at them, and sharptails, from time to time, were dropping from the slate sky.

And then the chickens began holding tighter. Friend Wife and Nafziger and Bob the Lab were in front and to the side of me, heading down into a coulee. I took three steps to follow, and, with a sharp “kukkukkucoo” a grouse erupted at my feet. Well, not an eruption exactly. More like a lazy flush. The bird, heading straight out, barely moving at 20 yards, hadn’t turned on the afterburners.

I didn’t even mount the double. The gun was right, the load was right, and the bird should have been a bundle of feathers on the ground. But I was psyched for wild flushes 60 yards out, so the pheasant-like rise took me too much by surprise.

That bird broke the back of our bad gunning. Birds started behaving more normally, holding for the dogs, then coming up like huge coveys of giant quail. Even the pointing dogs were getting their share.

By day’s end, the sun had broken through, and we’d taken our limits from about 200 flushes. And a little morning rain was just a distant memory.