Tough starts are nothing new when it comes to bird season, population spikes and crashes are the norm when it comes to ruffed grouse. After a trip to Denali National Park, I came back to British Columbia chomping at the bit to pull a firearm out of the safe and get hunting. The past couple seasons have started with an old, over/under 12 gauge and ruffed grouse. I fully expected this fall to start the same way, instead I came away with a lot of kilometres walked and an empty game vest. It wasn’t until my fourth day of grousing that I actually had a good bit of action.
There's something different about the bird on the left.
Up until 2006 there was the blue grouse, it was in this fateful year that DNA evidence split them in two. Now-a-days they are either the sooty or dusky grouse. Here in the Regions I hunt they seem to list them as dusky, though I haven’t the experience to differentiate between the two. I have a tendency to just think of, and call them blue grouse, guess I’m more of a lumper than a splitter.
Until this fall it was somewhat irrelevant whether I could figure out the difference between a sooty or dusky, I had seen them, but I haven’t seen one with a bead in front of it. This all changed on September 24th, 2024. The previous afternoon hunts having been quiet I changed things up and got there just after sunrise. While things were brightening up I had only made it fifty yards from the truck and took down my first bird, within a half hour I got two more.
A blue grouse, I mean dusky on the left with two ruffed grouse tails.
Walking up on that first bird something seemed very different, yet similar. The grouse was bigger and duller, different shades. As I was flipping through the feathers the solid colours of the tail struck me as odd. After knocking down the second bird, a ruffed grouse it was an easy side by side comparison, confirming that I had finally got a blue grouse. Sure its technically a dusky grouse, by regulation and science, but I’ll continue to call it by its old school name.
See you on the water or the mountain.
-Matthew Mallory
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