Grouse hunters receiving mixed reviews this year

Mixed reviews are still coming in for the forest grouse hunting season that opened Sept. 1 in Idaho and Washington.

If you stumble onto a brood of ruffed grouse or blue grouse, you can get your limit in a single flush and go home thinking the mountains are chuck full of the suckers.

Or, you can resign yourself to the likelihood of simply enjoying a nice walk in the woods.

Driving into Pend Oreille County during the Labor Day weekend, I thought I was headed for a grouse bonanza after passing a ruff standing on the road I was driving en route to the higher haunts of the blues in the Colville National Forest.

I don’t road hunt, and the ruffed grouse was in an area too steep and thick to hunt with the dog, so I let it be.

Biologists in northeastern Washington say hunters shouldn’t pass up too many opportunities this year. Informal sightings indicate grouse numbers are low.

“We do drumming surveys in the spring that have told us the population of breeding ruffed grouse males is fairly stable,” said Steve Zender, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist in Chewelah.

But there’s no efficient way to conduct brood surveys to document the success of the hatch on elusive birds scattered over vast areas of forest, he said.

“I thought this year would be good with the spring rain and all the berries and cover, but from what I’ve been seeing and hearing, the brood sizes look small and the nesting success appears to have been poor.”

Jerry Cline, biologist on the Little Pend Oreille Wildlife Refuge, had virtually the identical observation.

Some people are blaming the grim grouse prospects on the boom in non-native wild turkeys.

“I’ve heard people say the turkeys peck the grouse eggs in the nest, but I don’t know where they get that information,” he said, noting the cause is more likely an environmental issue, such as weather at a critical period in the nesting.

“One thing about grouse, when conditions are right, they can come back in a hurry,” he said.

Reports from farther west suggest conditions were considerably better this year for grouse.

Matt Monda, Fish and Wildlife Department regional wildlife manager in Ephrata, had a great opening weekend, noting, “We have grouse everywhere there’s supposed to be grouse in Okanogan and Chelan counties,” he said. “And lots of them, ruffs and blues.”

Indeed, a hunter who was in the Yakima area scouting for the archery elk season Labor Day weekend, said the number of grouse in the high country was overwhelming, even for hunters gearing up for big game.

“Instead of scouting for elk, they were going all over the ridges in places like Table Mountain (near the Colockum area) shooting limits of grouse,” he said. “By the time the elk season opened, the elk must have been all spooked down into the deep canyons.”

As for me, after hours of hiking up in Pend Oreille County, my English setter locked onto one hard point on a single blue grouse that flushed behind trees and offered no chance at a shot.

Later the dog and I shared some quality time as I swabbed and flushed his eyes to get out the grass seeds in his eyelids.

The bounty of mountain grass that flourished from spring rains had not been pounded with enough late summer rain and wind to release the seed.

I’ll return when the conditions are better, the leaves have dropped from the trees and my dog and I have better odds of finding the needle in the haystack.

Trout thief: Two Spokane fly fishers encountered a gang of robbers on the Spokane River recently.

Jay Hagen, a senior at Lewis and Clark High School, was floating the river in a personal pontoon along with his dad, John, when they noticed the thugs, clad in black and white, following them down the stream.

“They were sitting there in the trees watching me when I stopped,” said Jay, who was fishing the stretch between Maple Street and Meenach Drive. “I was standing in the middle of the river fishing when I hooked into a pretty big fish. That’s when one of them swooped down, grabbed the fish and started flying away with it.”

Hagen said the fish had been giving him a good battle, but even the stout tippet attached to his green Woolly Bugger was no match for a powerful osprey.

“He snapped the line and then dropped the fish back in the river,” he said. “Then he went back up in a tree.”

The question is, did the bird of prey drop the fish on purpose, or was it catching and releasing for sport?

The osprey was one of a group, possibly a family unit that’s about to split up to find independent adventure on their southern migration.

“The bird continued to follow me down river, but I didn’t catch any more fish,” Hagen said. “But one of my dad’s friends had the same thing happen to him.”

Sounds like organized crime.