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Scouting prime habitat is key to hunting upland game birds

Scouting prime habitat is key to hunting upland game birds

Ruffed grouse are brush bums and do not like mature forests. Woodcock like to have muddy feet. Ring-necked pheasants do not eat dirt and roost in trees.

Remembering those simple statements when you are laying out plans for upland game bird hunting in Ohio or Michigan, or anywhere in the Midwest this fall, will help put some birds in the game bag this fall.

Grouse and woodcock hunting already are under way in Michigan and they come on-line by next weekend in Ohio. Pheasant hunting will be open in both states in the next few weeks.

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Scouting and knocking on doors for private-lands permission top the list of prudent preseason preparations. It is more important, biologists say, to find the right habitat than to worry about actually scouting up individual birds.

Northwest Ohio bird hunters generally will find the better pheasant hunting in this corner of the state, but will have to travel to more forested regions of Ohio or to Michigan for grouse and woodcock. Early-season Buckeye bow hunters heading south or east might consider setting aside a few hours on a weekend - during the mid-day lull, for instance - checking out grouse and woodcock habitat.

Actually, notes Ohio biologist Mike Reynolds, veteran grouse hunters begin their preparations in spring, during the breeding season when males "drum." Drumming is a wing-beating display meant to attract mates. Himself always thought that drumming sounded akin to someone trying to dribble a bowling ball.

Reynolds notes that grouse are homebodies and stick to designated territories. Mark down drumming coordinates, even roughly, in the spring while turkey hunting or mushrooming and you can return there in fall to try flushing a grouse or two.

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"Locally we ought to have some pretty good hunting this fall," said Reynolds, who is the grouse specialist for the Ohio Division of Wildlife. He noted the counties adjacent to the Ohio River, from Columbiana in the northeast to Brown and Adams in the southwest seem to have the highest flushing rates from year to year.

Sections of Shawnee State Forest and the Marietta District of Wayne National Forest in Monroe and Washington counties are prime public lands to scout. Look particularly for areas where logging has been conducted and the open areas are returning to brush - tangles of greenbrier, blackberry, raspberry, wild grape, and such, and sapling growth that ideally includes aspens and alders.

Reynolds said that a major ice storm in 2003 downed a lot of mature timber and created large openings in the overhead tree canopy. Salvage logging of the storm-wracked timber opened the ground to sunlight and early revegetation and it is becoming very "grousy" now. "There's greenbrier eight feet tall," the biologist said of Shawnee tracts in Scioto County. But the country is steep, and the tangles are thick and negotiating them is not for the fainthearted.

Reynolds added that public hunting agreements on some commercial timber lands also may provide a reservoir for grouse where habitat is in juvenile or regenerating stages. The Ohio Division of Wildlife has public hunting agreements on about 35,000 acres of commercial timberland owned by Scioto Land Co. and RMK Timber Group in Vinton, Jackson, and Pike counties. A limited supply of maps of the public access areas is available by contacting Wildlife District 4 in Athens, 740-589-9930.

Outside such pockets of emergent brush and forest land, however, grouse are scarce, Reynolds said. "There's no way to sugarcoat it."

The Ohio grouse season is long, opening Saturday and running through Feb. 29. The bag limit is three a day.

Woodcock, in Reynolds' opinion, are an underused game resource in Ohio because of the timing of peak migration in early November. "Most guys are sitting in their tree stands waiting for a buck in the rut," he said.

Peak woodcock migrations through Ohio usually occur between Halloween and mid-November.

"You can find big concentrations of birds if you're in the right place at the right time," Reynolds noted, adding that "a lot of our birds probably come from Ontario."

Speaking of the right place, he suggests scouting old fields for woodcock, especially ones that may have some wet places where these long-billed game birds can probe for earthworms. Also called timberdoddles, woodcock often are found in grouse coverts, especially the swampier ones.

Woodcock season opens Friday and runs through Nov. 25. The daily bag is three.

In Michigan, the grouse season opened Sept. 15 and runs through Nov. 14 and resumes Dec. 1 to Jan. 1. Woodcock season is Sept. 22 to Nov. 5.

"We're about half way between the bottom and peak of the [10-year] cycle, on the uphill side of that," summed Al Stewart. He is the upland game bird specialist for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. The cyclical grouse should peak in 2010.

"People who hunted grouse in Michigan last year and found birds probably should have a good chance of finding them in the same places this year." Stewart noted the northern lower and upper peninsulas provide the best grouse habitats.

"You're looking for young aspen stands. An eye for habitat is pretty valuable."

On the woodcock front, Stewart suggests scouting for stands of tag alder and young aspen, with moist areas interspersed. Michigan is a top producer of woodcock, the biologist noted, especially the northern two-thirds of the state. Weather and decreasing daylight trigger migration, which peaks usually in late October to early November. The birds winter in northern Louisiana and southern Arkansas.

Rick Stokes, an avid upland hunter from Bellevue, has hunted northeast lower Michigan already this fall and found excellent hunting and flush-rates. "You can take five grouse and three woodcock a day," he noted. With that, he added, "you can burn up a box of shells a day," he said. Stokes is back up north this week after more grouse.

Neighboring Pennsylvania is forecasting a very good grouse season, with numbers at relatively high levels. That state fields 100,000 grouse hunters.

The season there runs from Saturday through Nov. 24 and Dec. 10 through 22, and Dec. 26 through Jan. 26. The Pennsylvania Game Commission Web site is www.pgc.state.pa.us.

TUESDAY: The 2007 pheasant hunting outlook.

First Published October 7, 2007, 11:30 a.m.

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