Cocking a quizzical eyebrow over a squinched-down blue eye, the old rancher sputtered, “Sharp-tailed what ?”
“Sharp-tailed grouse, you know, the brown prairie birds with the pointed …”
“Oh, you mean chickens!” he interrupted. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
Had I known Ed a little better, I would have noticed the beginnings of a smile lurking under his bushy gray mustache and the mischievous twinkle in his eyes. Ed, who ranches in the rolling grassland country south of Malta, Montana, knew full well what sharp-tailed grouse were, but, like most Montana ranchers, he’s always called them “chickens.” Since I was a stranger in his country, he figured I should learn to speak his language.
When my hunting prospects are hanging in the balance, I learn quickly. “Any chance I could do some, uh, chicken hunting on your place tomorrow?” I asked.
“Suppose so,” he said, “provided you’re willin’ to park your truck and walk.”
Just then the soft winnowing of wings sounded above us, and we looked up to see a squadron of sharptails flying high and fast, white undersides flashing silver in the fading light, headed for some distant roosting place. “Pretty, ain’t they?” Ed said, as we watched them grow smaller and finally disappear into the rose-tinged prairie sunset. “Should call ’em snowbellies.”
The handsome, homespun sharptail is closely intertwined with the human and natural history of the northern plains. Native American dancers mimicked the sharptail’s elaborate courtship ritual and used its feathers for decoration. Lewis and Clark observed large numbers of the “pointed tail prairie hen” on their journey up the Missouri, and were impressed with the birds’ specialized means of coping with northern winters: “The toes are also curiously bordered on their lower edges with narrow hard scales … thus adding to the width of the tread which nature seems … to have furnished them at this season for passing over the snow with more ease.”
The sharptail later greeted the pioneer cattlemen, whose herds replaced the bison on the western plains. Teddy Roosevelt, who ranched near the North Dakota-Montana border in the 1880s, wrote: “On more than one occasion I would have gone supperless or dinnerless had it not been for some of these grouse… . By the middle of August the young are well enough grown to shoot, and are then most delicious eating.”
Market hunters, too, took advantage of the sharptail’s table qualities. Setting out in the morning with a horse-drawn buckboard, they would return with a wagonload of birds to be barreled and shipped to eastern cities. In 1879, the Grand Pacific Hotel in Chicago included “roast pin-tail grouse” among a long list of game delicacies.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s the sharptail helped feed the army of homesteaders flocking to Dakota and Montana territories, lured by the promise of free land and a new beginning. With fresh meat often in short supply, they welcomed the addition of “chickens” to the family larder. In M. D. Johnson’s book, Feathers from the Prairie, one old-timer reminisced on life in the 1890s: “We generally ate one or two [sharptails] whenever we wanted them at any time of the year. It was common for nearly everyone to live off grouse in those days.”
Poking around the abandoned homesteads that dot the eastern Montana prairie, one can almost feel the presence of the hardy souls who lived there. Most reaped a bitter harvest of dust and despair, but some—perhaps the toughest or the luckiest—endured droughts, blizzards, grasshoppers, and hailstorms to carve out a permanent niche on the prairie. Many of their descendants, like my friend Ed, still occupy the land. Life is better now, thanks to modern conveniences, but it’s still no bowl of cherries.
Some years ago, before the advent of cell phones, Ed and his wife, Ila, spent a long night in their car, waiting out a freak spring blizzard that piled snow in eight-foot drifts around their house. They’d been to town and as the weather worsened, hurried for home. They almost made it, too. They were stuck in their own ranch driveway, not more than a few hundred yards from their house, when the full fury of the storm hit. To risk a dash to the house in the whiteout would have been folly; many an old-time homesteader perished only yards from his doorstep, disoriented by a prairie blizzard. Ed and Ila stayed in the car until the next morning, when a neighbor came to their rescue on a snowmobile.
Tough birds, Ed and Ila. Tough birds, too, the sharp-tailed grouse. In winter they burrow into freshly fallen snow to escape the howling wind. In spring, the survivors gather on timeworn dancing grounds to celebrate the arrival of a new cycle of life on the plains. In summer, they take shelter from the heat by squatting on a breezy ridgetop or in the shade of chokecherry trees. But it is in autumn, when they wax fat on rosehips and frost-numbed grasshoppers, that the hunter knows them best.
I hunted sharptails for the first time in southwestern Saskatchewan almost forty years ago. I lived in Minnesota then, and some friends and I had made the thousand-mile trek to hunt geese in the wheat fields around the little town of Kindersley. We worked the huge flocks of snows, Canadas, and whitefronts that stage in this area in early fall, shooting from shallow pits chiseled at great cost of sweat and muscle from the prairie hardpan. In the mornings we hunted geese, in the afternoons we scouted geese, and at night we dug goose pits by lantern light. In the middle of the day, when we should have been resting, we hunted Hungarian partridge and sharp-tailed grouse. We were new to the country and wanted to see and experience as much as we could.
We looked for sharptails and Huns around abandoned homesteads, where trees and grass formed islands of cover in the expanses of wheat—or in the sandhills, where the soil and topography favored grazing over farming. As much as I liked the suspense of huddling in a clammy goose pit, scarcely daring to breathe while a flock of honking geese backpedaled down to our decoys, my fate was sealed when that first sharptail clattered up from a wild rose thicket. From then on, I wanted to hunt grouse.
The primary range of the plains sharptail—the subspecies that inhabits the northern plains—includes the eastern two-thirds of Montana, a slice of northeastern Wyoming, the western portions of Nebraska and North and South Dakota, and much of Alberta and Saskatchewan to the north. It is primarily a grassland bird, although it likes some brush or trees to round out its habitat. In Montana, the birds do best where shrub-filled coulees dissect the upland prairie, providing summer shade and refuge from winter storms.
Although the Conservation Reserve Program has been a godsend to sharptails and other plains wildlife since its inception in the 1980s, we are not likely to see a return to the days when thousands of grouse filled the air in a great roar of wings. Consider the reflections of Mrs. H. E. Crofford, a pioneer schoolteacher who traveled from Fargo, North Dakota, in 1871: “The grass that year was more than two feet high… . Chickens [sharptails] were thick. When we went out for a drive, as we sometimes did, the wheels of the vehicle or the horse’s feet often crushed their eggs. I hated to see the wheel come up, dripping egg yolks. That wonderful grass waved like a sea in the sunlight, a forerunner of the wheat fields that would wave there in after years.”
The homesteaders, who were more interested in meat than sport, began harvesting their birds about the middle of August. The young birds made easy targets and tender table fare. Today, most western states and provinces open the sharptail season in early September, when the birds are almost fully grown. This is the best time for hunting them because the birds are still in family groups and more inclined to hold for pointing dogs. Later in the fall they gather in large flocks and get progressively wilder and harder to approach.
Opening day usually finds me working a hay meadow adjacent to a brush-bordered stream shortly after sunrise. Last year I hadn’t gone more than a quarter of a mile when my Brittany, Ollie, tightened up on a high-headed point. I walked in quickly and a dozen brown- and-white birds erupted from the bunchgrass, uttering the sharptail’s familiar cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk. I knocked one down with my first shot but missed with the second. While I was reloading my over/under, three more birds flushed off to my left and followed the others over a rise and out of sight.
Mature sharptails sometimes fly more than a mile after being flushed, but early in the fall the birds often scatter and drop into cover within a few hundred yards. I followed their line of flight over the ridge to a draw blanketed with wild rose, snowberry, and choke- cherry. As I entered the cover, Ollie hesitated, took a few steps forward and froze on point. I got the single when it flushed and took two more birds over points farther down the coulee.
This was classic early season sharptail hunting. It doesn’t always go so smoothly, even in September. But by late fall, when the cover has thinned and the birds have gathered into bigger flocks, conditions get tougher. Spooky birds, wild flushes, and long shots are typical after mid-October, although birds in Conservation Reserve grassland sometimes hold well for pointing dogs.
Because of the changing conditions, it’s hard to generalize about guns and loads for sharptails. In September, I use a 12 or 20 gauge over/under choked improved cylinder and modified with No. 6 shot. Later in the fall, a full choke might work better on wild-flushing birds. For all-around use, modified choke is a good compromise.
Sharptail hunting is at its best early in the season when the young birds allow good dog work, the temperatures are ideal for camping, and the prairie scenery is at its autumn best. After a long day of hunting, a cold drink, and a good meal, a person can’t be blamed for letting his imagination soar. I can look into the embers of my campfire and see a herd of bison bordered by a skulking pack of buffalo wolves, Lewis and Clark forging slowly up the Missouri, or perhaps a homesteader, an old hammer gun in one hand and brace of sharptails in the other, striding toward a humble log dwelling.
As the fire burns down and the last coals flicker and go out, the buffalo and wolves grow silent, Lewis and Clark vanish into the river mist, and the homesteader disappears into his cabin, which now stands empty, slowly returning to the prairie sod. Only the snow-bellied bird remains.