In Search of Sharptails

The grouse we shoot flushed 150 yards distant—something pretty much unimaginable had we been hunting Minnesota’s ruffed grouse, a denizen of tangled aspen thickets where vision is limited to a few yards. But we are hunting a less celebrated Minnesota grouse, the sharptail, which lives in a vast open landscape where you can see for hundreds of yards—or more.

Photographer Mike Dvorak and I are standing on a rise, looking across a broad meadow as another hunter in our group follows his dog toward a low-lying patch of brush. Suddenly, a covey of perhaps a dozen sharptails bursts from the cover and takes to the sky. Mike and I watch the birds scatter. Then suddenly we realize two are flying directly toward us.

I pick up on the one closest, miss the first shot as it flies toward me, and hit the second after it passes overhead. As I go to retrieve my bird and wonder why my dog isn’t helping me, I realize Mike has downed a grouse as well and my dog is retrieving his bird—to me. I take the bird and hand it back to Mike.

Ruffed grouse usually flush singly and dodge behind screens of brush and aspen. Today, we are seeing coveys of birds and enjoy a clear line of sight, often for hundreds of yards in all directions.

We are hunting in far northwestern Minnesota, two miles from Canada. I’ve joined a group of nine Minnesota Department of Natural Resources wildlife managers and biologists who have gathered to camp and hunt on the opening weekend of grouse season in mid-September.

They call this landscape “aspen parkland,” a term that suggests its components but not its essence. It’s not the kind of manicured parkland you’d visit for a picnic. Instead, the vegetation is patchy and ragged and rough—big fens of wiregrass sedge, scattered stands of aspen and willow saplings, and random copses of bur oak and bog birch. The aspen are mostly stunted, thick, and crooked. Compared to the tall and reasonably straight trees in the aspen forests farther east, these trees are like the weather-beaten digits of an old farmer next to the fingers of a concert pianist.

And the birds—sharp-tailed grouse, or sharptails, or sharpies—they huddle in coveys, burst into open sky, and flap-flap-glide into the next county. They are one-third heavier than ruffed grouse, with long central tail feathers—hence the name—and, during breeding season among displaying males, bright yellow eyebrows and purple air sacs visible during their courtship dancing displays.

They are sometimes called the firebird or fire grouse, for they often populate big clearings left by wildland fires. They might also be called Minnesota’s forgotten grouse, because less than a century ago they were a widespread and popular upland game bird, but hardly anyone thinks to hunt for them in Minnesota anymore. According to the Minnesota Sharp-tailed Grouse Society, as recently as 1949, hunters took 150,000 sharptails in Minnesota. Since the early 1990s, the harvest has fluctuated between 5,000 and 22,000 birds as the species’ range in Minnesota has shrunk and the number who hunt them in Minnesota has also declined. “I don’t have a great explanation for why I haven’t done it,” said a friend who is an avid upland hunter, “other than in the same amount of driving time, I can be in the Dakotas,” which are renowned for sharpies.

Sharptails once lived across northern Minnesota—and east as far as Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. They even lived on Isle Royale, having flown from the mainland over 15 miles of open water—a trip the short-flying ruffed grouse was never known to have made. Now sharptails have disappeared from most of northern Minnesota. They persist in huntable numbers mainly in the aspen parklands, where they thrive—at densities comparable to what is found in the heart of their range in the Great Plains and Canada’s prairie region, according to the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology. What happened? Why are birds so plentiful in northwestern Minnesota while the population dwindled elsewhere in the state?

A Short Natural History. What happened was fire. And the lack of it—because of more efficient wildland fire suppression.

Sharptails, like their close relatives the prairie chicken, prefer wide-open spaces, where the many eyes of a flock of birds can see for miles and stay alert to predators, both mammalian and avian. Native American tribes in Minnesota and elsewhere once enthusiastically set fires to clear forest, reinvigorate prairies, and maintain habitat for wildlife ranging from elk to sharptails.

“They were common enough so that the native indigenous people knew them quite well and knew that they were highly associated with burned areas, whether that was in the grasslands or the shrubland or the intermediate zones between grass and forest,” says Dave Pauly.

Pauly, a retired DNR wildlife manager, is habitat project coordinator for the Minnesota Sharp-tailed Grouse Society. He became an admirer of the sharptail when he first watched their stutter-step mating displays on grassy dancing grounds known as leks. He’s been an avid watcher and hunter and lek counter of the birds ever since.

White settlement put an end to the Native Americans’ use of fire, but large-scale logging soon led to a late 19th-century and early 20th-century era of fire. “After the great fires, especially in east-central and northeastern Minnesota—the Hinckley fires and Moose Lake fires—that’s when the sharptail grouse populations really kicked into gear,” Pauly says. Those devastating fires cleared large areas of forest and set the stage for a resurgence of early successional habitats.

“Sharptails needed an open vista kind of landscape. Those fires regenerated and perpetuated that expansive shrubland kind of habitat,” says Pauly. “The birds were most numerous beginning in the late ’50s and all the way into the ’60s. In those years sharp-tailed grouse was the number one upland bird species harvested in Minnesota.”

But for decades now, sharptails have been disappearing from familiar haunts, especially in east-central Minnesota. The burns, barrens, and small family farms that kept the landscape open but brushy and grassy have disappeared. Some areas have been taken over by giant farms—not good for sharptails. Others have been colonized by trees and transformed into mature forests, managed now as recreational land for hunting deer and turkey.

“The openness of the habitat is really losing ground,” Pauly said. “You know, none of us sharptail aficionados can fault those people who buy recreational land for deer as the primary species they want to interact with. But that’s been one of the major problems in trying to manage sharptails, especially in east-central Minnesota—95-plus percent of dancing grounds and sharptail habitat were related to private land.”

Knock Back the Woodies. Pauly lives in Hinckley, where sharptails were once common. With the Minnesota Sharp-tailed Grouse Society, he has obtained Conservation Partners Legacy grants, organized habitat projects, and developed partnerships with wildlife agencies and other conservation groups to restore the habitat sharptails rely on.

The focus of sharptail management nowadays is the aspen parkland of the far northwest, where wildlife managers have the advantage of a landscape that is naturally prone to openings and a public land base of hundreds of thousands of acres owned by the federal and state governments. The Nature Conservancy also owns and manages tens of thousands of acres and works closely with the DNR, planning prescribed burns and conservation grazing practices to keep the landscape open.

Minnesota’s aspen parkland is located in the transition zone between tallgrass prairie to the west and mixed forest and then coniferous forest to the east. As a result, maintaining the landscape is a constant battle between grassland and encroaching woods. Like other agencies and organizations in the region, the DNR invests significant labor and money in logging, brush cutting, mechanical thinning, and prescribed burns to tip the battle in favor of open habitat suitable not only for sharptails, but also elk.

On a landscape of such scale where public holdings are so large, management operations can be huge. Our hunting camp, in a large opening next to aspen woods, is in an area where a 3,000-acre prescribed burn was conducted last spring.

“The biggest thing we’re fighting is woody encroachment,” says Jason Wollin, manager of the Caribou Wildlife Management Area, one of several northwestern WMAs where sharptails flourish. The crew was picking up after breakfast and getting ready to hunt, pulling on orange vests and loading dogs in kennels. “Trying to knock back the woodies is the goal with fire. If you burn through woody cover in dormant time, it doesn’t really affect it. It almost just pisses it off and makes it grow back worse. So if you actually wait for it to start to leaf out and then hit it with fire at that time as it’s pulling all that energy up from the roots, you get a better bang for your buck.”

Because fire and mechanical cutting also benefit grazing elk, elk hunting organizations pay for much of the cost of habitat management in the area.
The evening before the season opened, we had talked to Bill Forbes, who is camping nearby. Forbes, an 80-year-old Moorhead businessman, has hunted the area for sharptails since he was a young man.

“This used to be all short stuff, and now it’s all brush growing up, and sharptails don’t like that. They want to see for miles,” he said. “In the ’70s, early ’80s, you’d be done by noon with six guys with a limit of three—you know, lots of birds. But the birds declined through the ’90s and the early 2000s. They were hard to find.”

Bird numbers have since improved. Maybe now would not be the equal of the bird’s heyday, but we were ready to give it a try.

Hunting Sharpies. Our group of hunters generally breaks into smaller groups that sweep through the large meadows of brush and sedges. Each of us has at least one dog—mostly Labrador retrievers and Lab mixes, but also German short-haired pointers, German wire-haired pointers, a small Munsterlander, and my English cocker spaniel. It’s way more dog power than necessary because sharpies are probably one of the better upland birds to hunt without a dog. Unlike pheasants, they don’t have to be pried from heavy cover but instead flush if a group of hunters draws close. Also unlike pheasants, they are easy to kill cleanly and don’t require a dog to fetch them out of some brushy hidey-hole. Our band of hunters carries mostly 12-gauges, but also a couple of 16s and 20s.

We concentrate our efforts on brushy fencelines and thickets amid grasses and forbs. We often flush birds where meadows butt against aspen woodlands. And on a couple of occasions, we surprise—and are surprised by—ruffed grouse where we expect to flush sharptails.

Late in the season, especially in the sparse grasslands of the western Dakotas and eastern Montana, sharptails are renowned for flushing beyond shotgun range and flying off for a mile, leading hunters on a long ruck under big skies. But these early-season birds in this thicker cover seemed to hold tighter and set down sooner, giving us ample shots and the opportunity to follow up and re-flush birds. On the first day, a couple of us filled our limit of three sharptails.

By the end of the first day, our band has accrued 19 sharpies and a couple of ruffed grouse. We clean the lion’s share at camp, coat them in flour and seasoning, and fry them up for a big feed. In sharp contrast to ruffed grouse, sharptails have dark meat—nearly the color of eggplant—with the substantial flavor of goose or beef. But cooked a bit on the rare side, they are delectable, and the breasts, thighs, and drumsticks disappear through the long communal dinner.

This early in the season, daylight lasts well into dinnertime and the weather is warm enough to comfortably sit around after eating. This is the seventh year this group has made this camping and hunting trip. Owing to a combination of improving habitat and favorable weather during spring nesting, it’s been one of the most successful get-togethers for number of birds flushed and bagged. As the evening sky darkens, Kyle Arola, the Thief Lake area wildlife supervisor who organizes the annual outing, considers the advantages of chasing sharpies during the early season rather than beating through the still-green leafy forest for ruffed grouse. Says Arola, “It’s a great way to start the upland bird season.”