Hunt Gather Talk: Sooty Grouse

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Welcome back the Hunt Gather Talk podcast, Season Two, sponsored by Hunt to Eat and Filson. This season will focus entirely on upland game — not only upland birds but also small game. Think of this as the podcast behind my latest cookbook, Pheasant, Quail, Cottontail, which covers all things upland.

Every episode will dig deep into the life, habits, hunting, lore, myth and of course prepping and cooking of a particular animal. Expect episodes on pheasants, rabbits, every species of quail, every species of grouse, wild turkeys, rails, woodcock, pigeons and doves, chukars and huns.

In this episode, I talk with two Alaska Dept. of Fish & Game biologists, Rick Merizon and Forrest Bowers, about the sooty grouse, which ranges from southeast Alaska to California. It is closely related to the dusky grouse of the Mountain West.ย 

Merizon and Bowers are both grouse hunters, as well as knowledgeable about the habitat, biology and habits of this reclusive grouse of the Pacific Coast forests. As for me, well, this is the grouse I hunt in the Sierra Nevada, so I can offer some insight into these birds at the southern edge of their range.

For more information on these topics, here are some helpful links:

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Transcript

As a service to those with hearing issues, or for anyone who would rather read our conversation than hear it, here is the transcript of the show. Enjoy!

Hank Shaw:

Welcome, everybody, back to another episode of the Hunt Gather Talk Podcast, sponsored by Hunt to Eat and Filson. I’m your host, Hank Shaw, and today we are going to talk about Sooty Grouse. Sooty, as in charcoal, soot? Yeah. This is the grouse that lives from Southeast Alaska all the way down to where I live in the Sierra Nevada of California. It is a solitary grouse, very difficult to hunt, and it often inhabits very, very tall, tall timber with a very wet, very dense kind of thing. Think Jurassic Park, only cooler. They are a fascinating species to hunt and there are all kinds of opportunities to chase this wily bird that is, I am happy to say, one of the greatest birds at the table in all of North America.

So you’re not going to want to miss this episode. I am talking with two members of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game who are experts at this particular grouse, and we’re going to talk not only about regular hunting for them, which is to say in the fall, but also this unusual and unique opportunity to hunt sooty grouse in the spring in Southeast Alaska. And that season is coming up very, very soon. So without further ado, we’ll take it away.

Welcome, Forrest Bowers and Rick Merizon. This is Hank Shaw from the Hunt Gather Talk Podcast, and I am super stoked to talk to some sooty grouse hunters. It’s a bizarre phrase because it sounds like you guys are actually sooty, but if we’re talking about what most of the country calls a blue grouse, but the splitters won in this one, and we’re going to talk about that in a minute. But what we’re talking about is the upland grouse of the Pacific coast. It really ranges from Alaska to California, and you guys are both working for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, right?

Rick Merizon:

That’s right.

Forrest Bowers:

That’s correct. I’m in Juneau, Alaska.

Hank Shaw:

Are you both in Juneau?

Rick Merizon:

I’m based in Palmer.

Hank Shaw:

Where’s Palmer?

Rick Merizon:

It’s about 50 minutes north of Anchorage. Yeah, Southcentral Alaska.

Hank Shaw:

Ah. And that’s sort of the Mat-Su?

Rick Merizon:

It is the Mat-Su indeed.

Hank Shaw:

Do you have sooty grouse up as far as you, or do they stay in Southeast?

Rick Merizon:

They are restricted to Southeast. Essentially, everything south of about Glacier Bay National Park, which many of your listeners might be able to relate to, which is northern Southeast Alaska, and then extend throughout most of Southeast Alaska.

Hank Shaw:

And it’s interestingly, and we’ll get into it in a bit, the native grouse, what I actually genuinely thought were duskies in the Sierra Nevada of California, are actually sooties.

Rick Merizon:

Right. Based on the somewhat recent delineation of the two species, yeah, that’s correct.

Hank Shaw:

Tell me a little bit about your background with this particular species. I know, Forrest, you hunt them quite a bit, and Rick, you’ve hunted them too, right?

Rick Merizon:

I have quite a bit also. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Hank Shaw:

So, Forrest, let’s start with you.

Forrest Bowers:

Sure. I live in Juneau, Alaska, and I actually work for the Division of Commercial Fisheries, with the Department of Fish and Game, so sooty grouse are not part of my job, but they certainly are one of my passions. And fortunately, in Juneau we are in the heart of sooty grouse country in Southeast. We have some tremendous grouse hunting opportunity here.

I got into sooty grouse hunting about 10 years ago, and it’s just something I look forward to every year. It’s a spring ritual, and it’s really one of my favorite times to be out in the woods. The brush hasn’t grown up yet, and it’s just a great time to get out and see some places that you’d otherwise never visit. And they’re really good eating.

Hank Shaw:

Yes. This I know.

Forrest Bowers:

That’s the big payoff.

Hank Shaw:

So, Rick, do you come all the way down from the Mat-Su to hunt them in Southeast, or do you hunt them somewhere else?

Rick Merizon:

I share Forrest’s passion for these birds. It’s a really unique, interesting bird to hunt and to research and do work on. My job with Fish and Game actually does tie directly into sooty grouse. I am the small game program coordinator for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Our program has statewide responsibilities, so despite the fact that I am based in Southcentral, I do spend a fair bit of my springtime, as Forrest was just pointing out, in Southeast. We travel throughout Southeast and we do spring breeding surveys for them. In the past I’ve gone down there, and if I have time, enjoy hunting them in the springtime when they’re hooting. I definitely, like Forrest said, it’s a great time of year to get out after a long, dark winter. It’s a really neat time to see the landscape come alive and to get to experience the sooty grouse hooting. It’s a really neat time of year and a really interesting bird.

Hank Shaw:

Well, let’s start with the bird itself. Most of us know these grouse. In general, they’re the large western white meat grouse from about the Rockies all the way to where you guys are in Alaska, and all the way down to about northern Arizona, New Mexico kind of area. As far as I know they do not live in Mexico anywhere.

Officially, the split was in 2006, but it’s really kind of a re-split, because I have some very, very old books about game birds of the Pacific Coast and of western North America, and they’ve split them sort of generically as far back as 1910 and 1890. You’ll see, “Oh, well, the sooty grouse are the grouse of the coasts and the dusky grouse are the ones in the interior,” and da da da da, so there’s been this splitter/lumper thing going for quite some time. I’m not entirely sure what settled it. Maybe you guys can shed some light on it.

Rick Merizon:

Yeah. I can take a first stab. Forrest might have some things to add, too. It’s an interesting back and forth, like you said. Even in Sibley’s bird identification guide, which is a widely known birding guide, even back in the late ’90 edition that I have, he recognized the difference between sooties and duskies even though they were officially called blue grouse in his book. That was before the split officially. Really, the most recent research that settled the issue was George Barrowclough back in 2004 along with a couple of other researchers did a pretty large, extensive tissue sampling collection as well as looking at some other morphological features and behavioral features, but it was really the genetic study that revealed that coastal bids really are somewhat unique from the interior birds. It gets a little bit muddled as you travel north of the Lower 48-Canada border, because one of the key distinctions that they used was the morphological characteristics, and one of the primary morphological characteristics they used was the apteria, which is that featherless patch along the neck.

Hank Shaw:

Oh, those throat sacs.

Rick Merizon:

Right. The throat sacs that males often inflate to some degree when they’re hooting in the spring. The interior birds are largely believed to be sort of a reddish pink color, where the coastal birds, particularly in Washington, Oregon, and northern California, have a yellow apteria. Well, you look at all the birds that I’ve harvested, and I’m sure Forrest will chime in here, too, but all the birds I’ve observed while out doing spring breeding surveys as well all have pink apteria. I’ve talked to George Barrowclough and I’ve talked to others that are familiar with the research that was done, and they do admit that when you get up to the very northern extent of their range, north of the Queen Charlotte Islands, things do get a little bit muddled. Nonetheless, the George Barrowclough study was really the one in ’04 that led to the most recent split.

Hank Shaw:

Do we know if they can interbreed or not?

Rick Merizon:

That is a good question, and I actually asked that question of George when I spoke to him a few years back. The dividing line, particularly north of the Canada-Lower 48 border, is largely believed to be the coast range mountains, which are a very high mountain range that’s largely glacial covered and frankly doesn’t offer a lot of opportunities for coastal birds to move to more interior regions, with the exception of a few major river valleys. It’s believed in those scenarios, in major river valleys where there is forested habitat where birds could theoretically move between quote-unquote the interior and the coast, that there may be some interbreeding, but to what degree it’s largely unknown. I think that because the species is a relatively sedentary species, meaning they’re not making these large movements like ptarmigan and other upland game birds, that the rate of interbreeding is probably fairly low.

Forrest Bowers:

And isn’t one of the characteristics the eye comb as well, that yellow or bright fleshy patch above the eye? Around Juneau here, we pretty much only see the yellow comb or eye patch there. I’m not sure if comb is actually the right word for it, but-

Hank Shaw:

It’s like a big old eyebrow.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. A big fleshy eyebrow. Yeah. We only see yellow around here, at least in my experience, but I believe with duskies that’s red as well, isn’t it?

Hank Shaw:

It’s definitely red on the Rocky Mountain birds.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. And then also the call is different. The duskies, they sound different when they hoot than sooty grouse.

Hank Shaw:

That’s what I’ve heard. The other thing I’ve heard is that the sooties, when they hoot, it’s so much louder than a dusky. It could just be a function of the fact that they’re standing way the hell up in the tree, where the duskies are hanging out on on the ground like all the other grouse.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. I have limited experience with duskies, but I do remember… I was actually in central Washington, it was in May, and I heard a bird hooting, and I’m like, “That’s a grouse,” but it didn’t sound like the grouse that we have here, the sooty grouse. It sounds like central Washington could be either species, so it might have just been a function of where this bird was at. It was kind of in a high prairie area, in some canyons, so no trees around to speak of.

Hank Shaw:

I’ve also read that typically, now, you guys may know better than me, but typically that sooties have 18 tail feathers and duskies have 20. That sounds pretty specific, but I’m not really familiar with numbers of tail feathers on birds in the sense that, “Oh, well, if it’s got 19, we really…” I don’t know if it’s a big deal or not. If you shoot 12 birds do they all have 18, or is there… I don’t know.

Rick Merizon:

I think from my standpoint, sort of a more practical morphological characteristic from a hunter’s perspective would be looking at the gray terminal tailband on a bird. The coastal birds tend to have a larger, wider I should say, gray terminal tailband, and the interior, or quote-unquote duskies, tend to have no terminal tailband at all, or a very, very narrow, just the very tips of the tail feathers are colored gray. I think that’s a more practical identifier, especially regarding morphological characteristics of the tail.

Hank Shaw:

Well, and there is of course the elephant in the room, right? So sooty grouse are called sooty grouse because they’re dark like soot, and duskies are a light gray.

Rick Merizon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah, the birds we see around here, that terminal tailband is about five-eighths, three-quarters of an inch wide. Typically, yeah, the birds are very, very dark, approaching black along their [crosstalk 00:13:50]-

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. I mean, literally charcoal. Like charcoal.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. Charcoal. Exactly.

Hank Shaw:

Whereas I hunt duskies in Utah and Colorado and places like that quite a bit, and they’re typically like Western gray squirrel color. A cool gray.

Forrest Bowers:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Hank Shaw:

So they’re both really big, right? As far as I know they could both get up to about four pounds?

Rick Merizon:

Yeah, that’s on the large side. Usually all the whole birds I’ve weighed are generally in the neighborhood of three to three-and-a-half. They can make it to four, but that’s a pretty big bird.

Hank Shaw:

Okay. So maybe the interior duskies are bigger, then, because it’s not uncommon to shoot big boomers in Utah or Colorado that, like, “What a big-ass grouse!” And you weigh it up, and it’s all of four pounds.

Forrest Bowers:

Wow.

Hank Shaw:

There’s a recipe on my website called Grouse [inaudible 00:14:44]. It’s basically like a grouse stew. I fed a bunch of people with one single big old grouse. It was the size of a roaster chicken. Plucked and gutted and ready to rock, it was three pounds.

Forrest Bowers:

They’re impressive. I pluck all of my birds and the big bird, it comes close to filling a dinner plate. They’re impressive.

Hank Shaw:

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So, habitat-wise. I think the habitat is also a distinction between the sooties and the duskies as well. Let me start with my birds. I live in northern California, and until recently I was under the impression that all of the grouse in the Sierra Nevada, which is right up the street from me, were duskies, because I had always heard that the sooties were a bird of the coastal range, and so it’s got to be kind of wet.

If you picture in your mind’s eye, if you’re listening to this, the wet, ferny… Imagine cool Jurassic Park, and that’s basically where sooties live. Where the duskies, imagine any scene in the Sierra Nevadas or the Rockies or the Wasatch or something like that, so kind of typical interior semi-dry conifer forests. They both dig conifers.

But apparently, we have the most inland species of sooties in the world, and they are fiendishly difficult to hunt in the Sierra Nevadas. Fiendishly. Legendarily. Like, if you know someone who has shot a grouse in the Sierra Nevada, that’s… You tip your cap. I’ve shot exactly one. Sure, I go after them a lot. Their season is very short.

I hear the best spots for them are way up north, like north of the Lassen Volcano. But in my area, Placer, El Dorado, Yosemite, kind of the middle range of the Sierra Nevada, it’s all mountain quail. It’s not sooty grouse. So for me, this particular grouse is something that you’re really only going to see if you go to Mendocino or Humboldt or Del Norte or someplace like that, and then I think they become more and more common as we get closer to where you guys live. Is that your understanding?

Forrest Bowers:

What makes them so difficult to hunt in your area, is it just the limited numbers? They’re just hard to find?

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. There aren’t any. There just aren’t any. I mean, you can find little teeny patches of them, and I hear guys will run into… Deer hunting is very difficult in the Sierra Nevada, so typically if you’re there for deer season, you’re going to hunt seven days trying to find your deer. Typically, a guy doing that will run across a grouse or two. But that is a very different thing from saying, “I’m going to go grouse hunting, and I have a very good chance of shooting grouse today.”

Forrest Bowers:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, around Juneau, and I think Rick probably has a better idea of this because of his knowledge doing survey work around Southeast Alaska, but my experience is that grouse are more abundant in Southeast near the mainland. So the further out towards the coast you get, say Sitka, that area, the less common. In fact, from what people who live in Sitka tell me, sooty grouse are fairly rare over there. But here in the Juneau area and I think around Ketchikan, closer to the mainland, they’re very abundant. In fact, where my office is, I’m pretty close to some large mountains, and in the spring if the traffic’s not too loud I can often hear a bird hooting from my office parking lot.

Hank Shaw:

Well, every place is close to mountains in Juneau.

Forrest Bowers:

Correct. Yes.

Hank Shaw:

Is there a tree type that they like more than others?

Forrest Bowers:

I tend to see them in large trees. Typically, if I’m hunting a bird, a specific bird, and I get into an area where I think I’m close, I’ll start looking in the larger trees in that area first. I see them both in spruce and hemlock trees, but in my experience they typically are eating hemlock needles more than spruce needles.

Hank Shaw:

I wanted to get into that. Talk to me about what they what they eat. I’m always fascinated by what any given game animal eats because, as a chef, I like to figure out, well, what does it eat, and then is what it eats edible to us? And if it is, what can I do with that in terms of a dish on a plate, because I’ve always found that whatever is in the environment of whatever it is that you’re chasing, as long as it’s edible, of course, goes well in a plate of food. In an earlier episode we talked about rosehips and hawthorn and mushrooms with prairie grouse, as being very, very good natural combinations. Other than when it gets cold and nasty, where they eat needles and catkins (they basically effectively become spruce grouse at that point, I would imagine), what do sooty grouse like to eat when it’s nice out?

Rick Merizon:

I think it really depends on the time of year. I’ll explain one challenge in describing that from a hunter’s perspective, because in Alaska we have very, very long season dates for this critter. Based on all of the harvest management and monitoring that we’ve done, about 90% of the harvest… Well, I should back up.

The season in Alaska runs from August 10th to May 15th, so it’s a very, very long season, and a lot of your listeners might be shocked by that. One saving grace we have in administering a long season like that is that about 90% of the harvest occurs in about a three- to four-week period at the very end of the season, when the males, specifically, are hooting.

Deer hunters do harvest them, for sure, in the fall, when they go out deer hunting throughout Southeast, but there aren’t all that many people that specifically target them in the fall. The majority of folks wait till the spring. It’s easier to locate… Quote-unquote easier. It’s never easy to locate a sooty grouse, but you have a distinct call you can walk in on in the spring versus in the fall.

Eating a bird harvested in the fall, I think they’re largely coming off of their summer diet, which is primarily invertebrates, largely aerial insects, and the berry crop that can be pretty abundant throughout Southeast. When folks are going out in the spring harvesting birds, they’ve been consuming spruce and hemlock needles, largely, for four or five months, almost exclusively, so that the birds can taste different depending on the time of year, the time of the season, that they’re harvested.

Hank Shaw:

I’ve noticed that spruce grouse are exactly like that as well. I’ve hunted sprucies way up in the boreal forests of Canada, and we’ve shot them right in the beginning of the season in September, and they were amazing. They were amazing. The flavor was phenomenal. The meat was kind of pink. It was neither dark nor light. And I’d shoot them all day long. The bag limit is low because they’re not real bright birds.

Forrest Bowers:

Right.

Hank Shaw:

They call them fool heads for a reason.

Forrest Bowers:

Fool heads.

Hank Shaw:

“Hey, why’d you shoot Louie? Oh, maybe I should fly. Oh, oh. You shot me, too.”

For kindness’ sake, we had low bag limits, but later, when there’s been a bunch of snow on the ground, they get darker, and they get… Critics will say they taste like turpentine, but I won’t go that far. I’ll say there’s a certain piney thing that you’re not going to get rid of and you might as well just go with at that point. Are the spring hooters the same way?

Forrest Bowers:

In my experience, they’re not. I’ve also hunted spruce grouse in the interior of Alaska, and have experienced that difference in flavor, the seasonal difference in flavor. I haven’t noticed that with sooty grouse at all. I hunt, as Rick said, I hunt primarily in the spring. My best hunting is typically right around the end of April or first part of May. Like I said, all the birds I’ve killed have been full of needles. That’s what’s in their crop, and there’s no evergreen type flavor at all.

Hank Shaw:

How about you, Rick?

Rick Merizon:

Yeah. I agree. The birds I’ve harvested in the spring are delicious. The meat is not quite as light as a ruffed grouse, for example, but boy, they’re awfully tasty. And I’ve harvested a lot. Living more in South Central, where our spruce grouse populations are quite abundant, and frankly, it’s the predominant grouse species where I live, I would much prefer a sooty grouse over a spruce grouse most of the year, given the choice.

Hank Shaw:

That’s fascinating. There has to be something chemical going on, because if they have a very similar diet… Oh, here’s a question. I’ve never opened them up side by side, and I know gizzard size is very individual. I know that sage grouse really don’t have a gizzard, because all they eat is sage leaves. They don’t actually have a gizzard. They have this weird sort of fleshy thing that’s not a gizzard and it’s not a stomach. It’s just something different. I’m wondering what you normally see in sooties versus sprucies.

Forrest Bowers:

Well, I’m glad you asked that, because I keep all the gizzards from my sooty grouse. They’re large. They’re about the size of a golf ball, maybe, give or take. They always have white quartz-type stones. That’s the grinding material. It’s always these white quartz stones, and then it’s just ground needles, is what I see. But that’s striking. Every bird I’ve opened up has had those white quartz stones in the gizzard.

Hank Shaw:

You ever find gold?

Forrest Bowers:

No.

Hank Shaw:

I mean, the reason I ask that is because a buddy of mine in gold country here in California, in Amador County, shot a wild turkey that had a gold nugget in its gizzard.

Forrest Bowers:

Wow.

Hank Shaw:

Isn’t that crazy?

Forrest Bowers:

That’s wild. Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

It’s a shiny thing.

Forrest Bowers:

If I’m hunting a specific bird, I’ll often keep note of where I see running water, because those birds are most likely picking that quartz up along the creek beds. For the most part, the understory is covered with vegetation, so that’s really the only place they could be getting those stones.

Hank Shaw:

Isn’t there running water pretty much everywhere in Southeast, though?

Forrest Bowers:

Well, that’s true.

Hank Shaw:

“You know, you’ve got to hunt water in Southeast, it’s the most important thing.” Really? Thanks. Really? This is not Nevada.

Forrest Bowers:

That’s right.

Hank Shaw:

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Their winter sale just ended, but Filson just received all their new products that are perfect for this wet, cold, and muddy time of year that we’re about to get into. Dry bags, rain pants, three-layer seam-sealed rain jackets that are perfect for any sort of wet and muddy weather. Filson was founded in Seattle, Washington, in 1897, when they started outfitting prospectors for the Klondike gold rush, and ever since then, they’ve been committed to making the toughest, roughest stuff there is. There’s a reason why their slogan is “Filson: You might as well have the best.” I’ve been wearing it for almost 30 years, and I hope you consider putting a pair on yourself. Thanks.

Hank Shaw:

All right. I definitely, definitely, definitely want to talk about this weird, freaky… You mentioned it a couple times before. The only spring grouse hunting in the United States is in Alaska, and it’s crazy. When I first heard about it some years ago, and then I think my colleague Steven Rinella did a show about it as well, like, “What? You can… What?” It just blew every upland bird hunter’s mind off our shoulders, like, “What the heck?” So tell me why we’re allowed to do it, and paint an audio picture of a spring hooter hunt, because I think a lot of people are really, really stoked to hear about that.

Rick Merizon:

Well, I can certainly talk about the regulation side of it, and even a little bit about the hunt itself, but I think Forrest probably has far more experience actually hunting them than I do, so I may let him take that one. But I’ll take a stab at the regulatory question.

Alaska in general is privileged in having very liberal season dates, and in many cases bag limits, for virtually all of our upland game birds, sooty grouse included. The challenge, if you’ve ever hunted in Southeast, deer hunted or just simply hiked in Southeast, you would very quickly realize, particularly when you try to get off trail, that it is a reasonably inhospitable, I would argue quite inhospitable, place to hike.

It’s very wet, as we’ve alluded to in the past. Almost all months of the year, it’s very wet. There’s a tremendous amount of understory vegetation that grabs your feet. There’s a lot of windfall. There’s very tall trees, very steep country, a lot of exposed rock. It is very unforgiving country, and in Southeast, or for those that aren’t familiar with the geography of Southeast, there’s a sliver of mainland along the eastern portion of Southeast Alaska, but most of it is dotted with a whole series of small to relatively large islands. It’s all very heavily forested. There are very few big meadows where it affords relatively easy walking.

There’s an excessively limited road system, largely restricted to the big cities. There are some logging roads that can be walked, but invariably sooty grouse are hooting and are huntable off of those logging roads, so even if you walk old logging roads you’re going to find yourself in past clearcuts or some very inhospitable country. I guess what I’m getting at is that the liberal season dates and bag limits that we have in Southeast, particularly coupled with the low human population, and subsequently low hunter density relative to other parts of this country, we can get away with that management scheme.

Our small game program monitors both the harvest and the abundance of various populations throughout Southeast Alaska very, very closely for that reason, particularly because males are being harvested, almost exclusively males are being harvested in the spring. People do harvest females, but really it’s the males that hoot and that bring a hunter off of a road or trail into the woods to try to locate that individual. So we can get away with a very liberal season date duration.

Hank Shaw:

What’s the bag limit?

Rick Merizon:

It’s five per day.

Hank Shaw:

Okay.

Rick Merizon:

And yes, there are absolutely hunters that harvest five birds per day, particularly in areas that have pretty high densities of birds. It can be challenging. I don’t consider myself a couch potato or a slouch by any stretch, but to even get two or three birds in your bag in a day is a pretty darn good day. You’re putting a lot of miles, tough miles, on your boots, and hiking through devil’s club, which is a very very thorny, head-high plant that just loves to whip around and hit you in the arm or the legs. Real steep, wet country that you’re slipping and sliding on, and it’s not easy hunting for anyone that’s done it.

Hank Shaw:

Here in California, we have a 20 snow goose limit every day. Lots of luck. Lots of luck. I know of exactly one person who has shot 20 snow geese in one day.

Rick Merizon:

Right. And what we’ve found doing statewide hunter surveys in Alaska, despite the stories that you hear in the magazine articles that you read, on average very few people even come close to their daily bag limit, on average. In general, the majority of hunters on average come back with one or maybe two birds, and I’m talking not only sooty grouse but ptarmigans, spruce grouse, ruffed grouse. So, generally speaking, despite the fact that we have fairly liberal bag limits, in general, very, very few hunters even approach that bag limit.

Hank Shaw:

You know, there’s this one dude out there who’s like, “I am the grouse whisperer.”

Rick Merizon:

Well, exactly, and that’s exactly what we’ve found, is that less than 10 percent of the hunting population that calls themselves dedicated grouse hunters actually achieve even close to a daily bag limit every time they go out.

Hank Shaw:

THat’s hard. It’s hard with any upland bird. I’ve hunted pretty much every upland bird in North America. You think about the quail. Okay, well, sure, you can shoot lots of quail. Good luck. Limit’s 15, and have I shot a limit? Yes, but it’s not that easy, and it’s kind of commensurate. The only actual upland bird that I have routinely shot limits of, like routinely, are pheasants. I’ve hunted three straight days and shot the limits all three days. Yeah, that might be the exception to the rule. But think about chukars in Nevada, or mountain quail. I’ve shot actually limits of dusky grouse in Utah. But still, it’s not every day.

Forrest Bowers:

Right. So, Hank, your listeners might also be surprised to know that sooty grouse hunting is not traditional upland hunting in that you’re not wing shooting. You’re generally shooting a bird that’s sitting in a tree, perched in a tree, or on the ground. Most people hunt with a .22, a rifle.

Hank Shaw:

Welcome to Ground Pound Town.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. There are a few people that hunt with shotguns, but they’re not wing shooting, for the most part. I don’t know anyone who has shot a flying sooty grouse. I’m sure people have, but none of my friends or people that I’ve talked with have reported doing that, and-

Hank Shaw:

So it’s funny that you should mention this, because I just, before we got on this recording, I wrote down the story of my chachalaca hunt. I hunted chachalacas on the Mexican border near Brownsville, Texas. It, too, is a tree-dwelling upland bird. It’s nickname is Mexican tree pheasant. Yes, you can shoot them in the air. It happens once in a while, when you catch a group. They usually travel in little groups, and they would fly from one impenetrable part of the brush to another impenetrable part of the brush. You can sometimes intercept them there, but typically, virtually everybody I’ve talked to who has actually killed one of these things, yeah, you just kind of whack them in trees. It’s not exactly the beautiful image of the bird rising over a point that a lot of upland hunters really live for. It, too, is also not really a dog thing.

Forrest Bowers:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I agree.

Hank Shaw:

Do you use dogs at all?

Forrest Bowers:

I have a chocolate lab, a great retriever, that comes hunting with me. Mostly she’s out for the hike. A dog can sometimes be useful if you have a bird that falls on a steep slope and rolls, or you wound a bird and it’s moving on the ground. The dog can be helpful in locating birds in that situation. Sometimes you will shoot a bird that lands on a steep slope, and they roll, or land in the hole, end up under a log. You can usually follow the trail of feathers pretty easily and locate that bird, but the dog can expedite that process. Certainly if you have a bird that’s wounded and running on the ground, the dog is helpful in that regard. But for the most part, you’re standing near the tree where the bird is perched. You make a good shot, and the bird lands, sometimes almost at your feet.

Hank Shaw:

Take me and the listeners through. So it’s sometime in April. What does it look like, what does it sound like, what does it smell like? You get up in the morning and you’re like, “You know what? I’m going to try and get some grouse today.” Take me through that day.

Forrest Bowers:

Well, in recent years we’ve had relatively little snow in Southeast Alaska in the spring, so it’s made for some great grouse hunting conditions. You’ll start out early in the morning, as the sun’s coming up. I typically will begin my hunt off of an established trail. I often start seeing birds at about 1000 feet elevation. I’ll hear them much sooner than that. You’ll hear the hoot, and it’s a deep sound that reverberates throughout the woods. It almost sounds like a person blowing across the top of a bottle. It’s about five or six notes, five or six beats, typically.

You start following that sound, and eventually you’ll get to a point where you know that the bird is close. You’ve maybe identified four, five, six trees, and it’s in one of those trees. I hunt with a pair of compact binoculars. I have some Leica 8×20 shirt-pocket binoculars that I bring. I’ll just start scanning the branches, start at the tops of the trees and work my way out each branch, and walk around the trees, try to gain elevation to look into the tree instead of looking up. Eventually you’ll locate the bird. I’ve spent an hour or more looking for a single bird.

Hank Shaw:

And is it hooting the whole time?

Forrest Bowers:

Hooting the whole time. Yup. Might stop for five minutes, but will start up again. It’s hooting the whole time. And sometimes you feel like, “Why is it taking me this long to see the bird? It’s right there.” When you finally spot it, they’re really well camouflaged. And then at that point the shot is actually almost kind of anticlimactic.

Hank Shaw:

I assume you go for head shots only, yeah?

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. I shoot for a neck shot. It’s a little bit bigger target. Yeah. The head is the part of the bird that’s moving around the most. I sort of shoot for the base of the neck, and then I don’t lose any meat and it’s a lethal shot.

Hank Shaw:

Gotcha.

Forrest Bowers:

They are such a large bird that if you can make a shot that you think you’re going to hit a vital organ and it just passes through the breast meat and the bird flies away, so that’s a situation I try to avoid.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah, really. That’s no good. That’s like all the stories you hear about guys who bow hunt turkeys and see a turkey flying away with its arrow in it. Nobody likes that.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. Yeah. Bad feeling.

Rick Merizon:

Right. It’s interesting, when I’ve been sooty grouse hunting, you know when you’re really close to the bird because… This sounds kind of goofy to say, and particularly to your listeners that may have never experienced this, but you literally can feel the hoot.

Forrest Bowers:

[crosstalk 00:41:44] feel it.

Rick Merizon:

Yes.

Forrest Bowers:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rick Merizon:

It’s almost like walking into a symphony where you can feel the bass drum in your chest, and it’s a very similar feeling. You’re hiking along and the hooting is getting a little bit louder, a little bit louder. Of course your breathing is getting heavier and heavier because you’re generally hiking uphill, and you think, “Aw, man, I just don’t know if I’m getting any closer.” You’ll hike another 20 feet up the hill and all of a sudden, boom! You feel this reverberation in your chest, and you think, okay. I am within one or two trees of this bird. Granted, it might be 100 feet over my head, but I am very close.

Hank Shaw:

Interesting. So is it usually… I’m imagining everything is green, everything is wet, there’s probably bits of snow here and there.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. Spring is a really wonderful time in Southeast Alaska to be outside. April and May are generally some of our drier months, so you can have some really wonderful dry weather when you’re out bird hunting. I don’t hunt if it’s raining hard, just because it’s loud in the woods then and it’s hard to hear the birds hooting. I try to avoid heavy rain. But yeah, the ground is often damp, the brush is wet. I wear gaiters. That’s one of my key pieces of equipment, gaiters. The other piece of key equipment are heavy leather gloves, because of the devil’s club. Devil’s club has these really aggressive thorns. And so heavy leather gloves, the binoculars, gaiters. I’ll sometimes carry some micro spikes if I get into some frozen ground, steep ground.

Hank Shaw:

What are micro spikes?

Forrest Bowers:

Just sort of mini-crampons that I can slip onto my boots.

Hank Shaw:

Gotcha.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. Snowshoes. If we do have a lot of snow, I will bring snowshoes. Like I said, I usually start to see birds at about 1000 feet elevation, give or take, so most of my hunting is between 1,000 and 2,000 feet elevation. Usually if I hear a bird and I start to look around, I’ll look for cliff-edge type terrain. That’s often where I’ll find birds, is along the edge of a break or a cliff edge, for whatever reason [crosstalk 00:44:21]-

Hank Shaw:

Great. So then they fall 1,000 feet down. Oh, well.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. It’s very common, if you’re hunting a specific bird and you’re hiking up and you see, like, “Oh, there’s even a small cliff edge or drop, I bet he’s on there somewhere.” Nine times out of 10, that’s where they’re at.

Rick Merizon:

What’s really interesting that I’ve noticed as a biologist, actually, trying to record biological observations of these critters is we’ve been doing spring breeding surveys for a number of years down in Southeast, and in Juneau, where Forrest lives. Forrest, it would be interesting to get your perspective on this as well. When we do these spring breeding surveys, we have these set routes that we walk, and we listen at listening posts every half-mile, much like a ruffed grouse perimeter survey, if your listeners are familiar. It’s a similar survey design.

Anyway, what we’ve noticed over the years with this species is that there are certain places where we consistently, year-in, year-out, are hearing birds. It’s a specific tree, and even within that tree it’s a specific branch or cluster of branches. These birds are not a long-lived species. These are at the most three, maybe four-year-old birds, and we’ve been doing spring breeding surveys now well longer than that. These are multigenerational observations of sooty grouse and yet they seem to be using the exact same acoustic platform. That’s the only explanation I have, is that there’s got to be some acoustic advantage to some of these hooting posts that broadcasts into the broader, deeper valley below, seemingly to attract a female. But like Forrest was saying, oftentimes these are on cliff edges or at the top of a 15-20 foot cliff with a little straggly spruce.

They don’t always occur in these very tall, typical rainforest kind of spruce trees that are 150 feet tall. Sometimes they’re in six-, seven-, eight-foot-tall spruce that are right up near treeline but hanging over a 15, even 30-foot cliff, looking down into a big, broad valley. And boy, every year there are birds in certain acoustic spots.

Hank Shaw:

That’s interesting, because grouse do the same thing. There are drumming logs in the East Coast and in the Midwest that are 100 years old.

Rick Merizon:

Right.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. That’s a great point, Rick. When you’re in that 1000-1500 foot elevation range, you’re in the big timber then, and so there the birds will often be in the large trees, up quite high. But as you approach treeline and start to get up near the alpine, you get into these scraggly windblown trees, and yeah, sometimes the birds are in a relatively small tree, quite visible, but often on a cliff edge. Before I shoot a bird, I’ll think about where it might land and make sure it’s recoverable.

Hank Shaw:

That is a plus.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. Yeah. And-

Rick Merizon:

And that’s another point [crosstalk 00:47:52], too, is that you can be hiking down a very popular trail that’s a mile from downtown Juneau, looking at cruise ships, and you’re hearing sooty grouse all around you. There are some that might only be 200 yards above you, up the hill off the trail, and you think, “Oh, man, that’s going to be so easy to go get,” yet when you attempt to actually go in to that bird, you’re 30 feet off the trail and you realize there’s no way you’re ever going to get close to that bird, certainly not close enough to take an ethical shot.

Forrest Bowers:

One thing I wanted to ask you about, Rick, on the surveys that you’ve done. Have you noticed a difference in the hoot pattern for a bird that’s on the ground versus a bird that’s in a tree? In my experience, a bird that’s on the ground, a male that’s hooting on the ground, will only hoot once, just a single note. So when I hear that pattern, I’ll start looking for birds that are on the ground, but if a bird’s in a tree, it’ll often be like five or six notes to the hoot. Does that make sense? Have you observed that?

Rick Merizon:

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Down in Petersburg where we do surveys, I’ve seen a lot more males on the ground, just the density seemed to be a little bit higher on some of those [inaudible 00:49:19] islands off of Mitkof and Petersburg area. I think those birds are simply forced to less desirable hooting locations, which presumably are at the ground. But I have noticed that also, that the hoot pattern does change. I haven’t necessarily noticed it’s just one hoot, but it is definitely different. The stereotypical hoot is a series of five increasing in volume notes. Yeah. No. There is something to that. I’ve noticed that, too.

Forrest Bowers:

And often, if I see a male on the ground, there frequently will be a female grouse nearby.

Hank Shaw:

Right, because she’s brought him down.

Forrest Bowers:

I don’t see a lot of female grouse. In a season where I might get myself onto 20 birds, I might see two females. That’s my experience, anyway. Sometimes I’ll go a season without ever seeing a female.

Hank Shaw:

So gear-wise, other than gaiters and, I imagine, good hiking boots, that sounds like it’s tailor-made for tin cloth. I’ve got a pair of tin cloth chaps and a tin cloth cruiser jacket, which it seems would be perfect against that devil’s club. By the way, do you know that you can pickle the devil’s club buds, and they’re amazing?

Forrest Bowers:

Hm. Wow. [crosstalk 00:50:54] that.

Hank Shaw:

I learned it from a friend of mine in Juneau, as a matter of fact. She gave me a jar of them and they were fantastic.

Forrest Bowers:

Cool.

Hank Shaw:

That might be a little bit before season. It’s right when the buds are coming out.

Forrest Bowers:

Cool. I’ll have to try that.

Hank Shaw:

Have you ever hunted them in the fall?

Forrest Bowers:

I’ve seen them when I’ve been out deer hunting, but I have never gone grouse hunting. I’ve never done a grouse hunt in the fall. I want to. I’m usually focused on fishing or big game hunting then. I have friends who have reported seeing large numbers of grouse in the alpine in the fall, and so that’s intriguing to me. I think that would be a really unique hunt. But I haven’t done that myself.

Hank Shaw:

I wonder if they’re sooties or if they’re ptarmigans or some other kind of a [crosstalk 00:51:45] grouse.

Forrest Bowers:

Well, I’ve wondered that, because most of the folks that have given me those reports are not hunters themselves. They might have been ptarmigan. Likely ptarmigan.

Hank Shaw:

Some sort of chicken-like bird. By the way, the only two grouse I have yet to hunt and eat are the willow and the rock ptarmigan.

Rick Merizon:

You should come on up to South Central, Hank. We’ll go out, do some ptarmigan hunting.

Hank Shaw:

Apparently you can kill them with Nalgenes.

Rick Merizon:

That’s a bit of a stretch, but-

Hank Shaw:

It’s been done.

Rick Merizon:

It has been [crosstalk 00:52:17]-

Forrest Bowers:

I would argue those are probably whitetail ptarmigan, which are notorious for being extremely approachable.

Hank Shaw:

It’s possible, yeah.

Forrest Bowers:

Rock and willow ptarmigan tend to flush a little more wild than a whitetail. But yes, that has been done.

Hank Shaw:

The only ptarmigan I’ve ever hunted were whitetails in Colorado, and they did let us get close, but they weren’t that tame. By the way, if you ever want a real, serious ptarmigan hunt, you need to come to Colorado. You start hunting them at 13,000 feet.

Forrest Bowers:

That sounds brutal.

Hank Shaw:

It’s basically goat hunting for micro chickens.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. Yeah.

In terms of other hunting gear, I use a lightweight compact 10/22 with a six-power scope, and I use a moderate velocity hollow-point ammo. You do need an accurate rifle, but it’s also nice to have a compact rifle because you’re often hand-over-hand crawling through brush. Having a compact rifle and kind of a low profile pack that doesn’t snag on the brush is pretty helpful.

Hank Shaw:

With a strap, no doubt, for the rifle.

Forrest Bowers:

Absolutely.

Hank Shaw:

I will tell you a little bit about hunting them for the rest of us. For the rest of us, you don’t get to hunt in the spring. It’s a typical… If you’ve ever been on a West Coast ruffed grouse hunt or a Rockies or you went to mountain dusky hunt, it’s very, very similar. You’re hiking mountains. They are always in mountains. It’s typically dry, so you do hunt water there. Where I have found… well, concentrations is overselling it, but where I have found more than one, it’s typically at an unknown little bit of water or a stream that’s still running in September in California.

The seasons for sooties are typically pretty short in Oregon, Washington, and California. I know in California the bag limit is very low. It’s only two birds a day. Most people I know who are successful grouse hunters (and when I say that, they’re typically not just shooting sooties, they’re sometimes shooting West Coast ruffies as well) are up in Mendocino and the Humboldt area of California, and then immediately north of there in Oregon, where there are way bigger densities than there are in the Sierra Nevada.

I know some people are raising their eyebrow, like, “Oh, I bet you Hank’s got a whole bunch of hunting holes in the Sierras, he’s just like, ‘Oh, there’s no grouse here, don’t come here.'” But no, I’m not joking. If you guys came down and wanted to hunt sooty grouse where I live, I would be able to get you on grouse, but it might take three days. We might only see two. Much easier mountain quail hunt, and even then, we wouldn’t shoot limits of mountain quail.

Forrest Bowers:

So it sounds like grouse hunting there is sort of an esoteric hunt. [crosstalk 00:55:27]-

Hank Shaw:

It’s not a thing.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. There’s probably a few people that are into it, right?

Hank Shaw:

Maybe, if that. I don’t know a single person from California or southern Oregon who’s like, “Yes, I’m a grouse hunter.” If you are, then that means you’re traveling. Because I am a grouse hunter, but I don’t do a lot of it by my house. We’re quail hunters here.

Let’s move to my favorite topic. Unlike some of the birds that… We’re covering every upland animal that I can think of in this season of the podcast, and the last episode, which was about rails, while rails are good to eat, I don’t think anybody, even a dedicated rail hunter, would, like, “Oh, they’re my favorite bird ever to eat.” Because chances are, the rails that you’ve been hunting have been eating crawfish or fiddler crabs or other kinds of marine inverts, which is great if you’re a salmon, but not so great if you’re a mammal or a bird. On the other hand, these grouse, both the sooties and the duskies, are arguably the best grouse of the entire clan in terms of birds to eat. I don’t know if you guys would agree with that or not.

Forrest Bowers:

I agree with that entirely. I think they have a lot going for them. The lighter meat, and then the size of the bird makes them easier to cook, and then they just have that wonderful mild flavor. It’s a very mild game bird flavor. Like I said earlier, I pluck all of my birds, and I typically pluck them as soon as I kill them. Their skin is thin. It’s easy to tear. So in my experience they’re easier to pluck right away when they’re still warm. And I do save the gizzards.

Hank Shaw:

It is a fascinating thing, that of all of the upland hunting, sooties may be your one chance, because it’s such a delay in between birds, typically, that that’s your chance to pick a bird when it’s still warm. Typically, with every other upland hunt, you want the next bird, and then you think about processing birds later.

Forrest Bowers:

Right. Exactly. Yeah, I don’t feel like I’m losing any opportunity when I take the time to pluck the bird. It doesn’t take that long.

Hank Shaw:

One thing that I find… Plus, it’s a trophy bird. You’re not going to shoot… Well, maybe you shoot five in one day, but then you pop open a bottle of champagne, and just kick back and I don’t know what, because you’re not going to shoot two days’ worth of limits. I don’t know. It’s probably been done by somebody.

Rick Merizon:

I was going to say there’s definitely hunters out there that really get after it. They get up in the mountains many times a week. But I think that’s far more the exception than the rule.

Forrest Bowers:

My experience, good hunters in the Juneau area might shoot a limit once or twice a system. A typical day would be two to three birds, but once or twice a season you’ll get four or five birds.

Hank Shaw:

That’s cool.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

So I think that the short answer on how do you cook a sooty grouse is effectively any way you cook a chicken. They’re a light meat. If you’ve shot duskies, they’re virtually the same bird in the kitchen. If you’ve only shot ruffed grouse, they’re like a gigantic ruffed grouse, and if you’ve only shot pheasants, they’re a more flavorful pheasant. I think one significant difference between a pheasant and either the sooties or the duskies would be the sinews in the drumsticks are not nearly as ferocious as they are in a pheasant. I don’t know if you guys have shot pheasants or not, but they’re effectively wild turkeys, so they have sinews in their bottom, in their drumsticks, that simply do not break down, so you have to remove them in some way. I have found that with these large Western grouse, they’re there, but they’re not so bad that you can’t really eat a drumstick if you roasted the whole bird.

Rick Merizon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right.

Hank Shaw:

There’s another trick that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, but it’s absolutely worth trying when you have one. So you’ve picked your bird. So when you go to the feet, use your shears or a knife and imagine the knee of the bird. So, every bird has… I use knee loosely. A knee that has four points. It’s like a box when you look at it. There’s point, point on the drumstick side, and then there’s a little gap, and then there’s point, point on the foot side.

If you run your knife in between those points to separate the drumstick from the leg, you will see lots and lots of tendons. So one trick that you can do, and again it doesn’t always work, is you bend the leg back, and you spin the foot around three or four times to create, effectively, a sinew rope. And then with one hand you hold on for dear life to the drumstick, and then you yank as hard as you can with your other hand the foot off the leg. If you do that correctly, you don’t lose any meat, and you pull most, if not all of the tendons out of the drumstick.

Now, again, it doesn’t work every time, but when it does, it’s pretty cool because the other thing that happens when you roast any bird like this… By the way, this works with any upland bird, and it works with ducks, too, but you typically don’t have bad sinews in ducks. When you roast birds that that has been done, the drumstick curls up, and you get this kind of lollipop effect when it roasts, and it’s really cool to look at. It’s an easier-to-eat bite.

Rick Merizon:

Cool.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. I’ll have to try that.

Rick Merizon:

Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

Giblets are another good thing. Dirty rice would probably be your gateway drug to eating grouse giblets, or really any giblets. Hearts are good. I have not shot enough sooty grouse to know if the livers ever get light colored, or are they always very dark?

Forrest Bowers:

I don’t think of them as being extremely dark. More of a pink color.

Rick Merizon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Forrest Bowers:

I have not eaten livers myself. I should try that, though.

Hank Shaw:

If they are pink, if they’re truly pink, like almost a white person’s skin color, that means they’re holding fat. The chicken livers you buy in the store, they’re holding fat. That’s why they’re that light. It’s a process called steatosis that birds do. I think people actually can do it, too. This is why you have rotten livers in people and everything. No one would want to eat my liver. If you see those light-colored livers, consider using them, because they’re going to be a richer and less iron-y and less liver-y flavor than… Sometimes ducks get… It’s almost the color of a Petit Verdot, like a really dark red wine.

So, Forrest, tell me. How do you cook your gizzards?

Forrest Bowers:

It kind of depends on what I’m doing with the rest of the bird. One of my favorite ways to cook grouse is I’ll take the breasts off. If I have a bird that’s maybe a little shot up or something, and skin’s torn, I’ll take the breasts off and with the carcass, the frame, I’ll just kind of simmer that, pull all the meat off, and make kind of a stew with biscuits. And with the breasts, I’ll slice those into strips [crosstalk 01:03:18]-

Hank Shaw:

Oh, like chicken and dumplings.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah, chicken and dumplings. Right. And then with the breasts, I’ll actually do a fried chicken batter and fry those with some hot sauce. I’ll fry the gizzards up with them. That’s a good way to use the gizzards. Other times, if I’m roasting a whole bird, I’ll use pan drippings, make gravy, and just slice that gizzard up that I’ve roasted with the bird, and put that in the gravy. But other times I’ll just fry it up in butter when I’m cooking the bird, and just eat that as a little snack while I’m working in the kitchen.

Hank Shaw:

Fried gizzards are kind of hilarious.

Forrest Bowers:

They are.

Hank Shaw:

It’s a thing, right? In two parts of the country. You can go to gas stations in the South and get fried gizzards, and then there’s this gap. You won’t see them at all in the Midwest, really. Occasionally you’ll find a spot. You won’t really see them in the Kansas-y, Texas-y area. And then it becomes a thing, really a serious thing, in Wyoming and Montana, where every little bar in some tiny town is going to have fried gizzards and red beer. That is another one that freaks me out. Like, how did you… Wait. Red beer? So that’s a michelada, which is a big Mexican thing, except the Montana version, as you might expect with Montanans, isn’t quite as spicy. It’s just a bizarre… Where do these traditions pop up? You almost never see anybody serving fried gizzards in, say, Nevada, or California, or Oregon. It’s just not a thing there.

Forrest Bowers:

When you said Montana-Wyoming, that’s Rocky Mountain Oysters. You’ve got other sweetmeats. There’s a tradition there of eating some of those organ meats. I don’t know many people that eat the organ meat from birds here, but I think they’re missing out.

Hank Shaw:

Giblets are awesome. How do you like to cook your birds, Rick?

Rick Merizon:

All the ways that you guys are talking about. I’ve even cooked them when I’ve been out in the field or on a hunting trip or something, just over an open fire with a little bit of seasoning. You can’t really go wrong, just based on the type of meat it is. Yeah, I’ve thrown the breast meat on the grill, on a hot grill, and grilled them really fast. You really can’t go wrong.

Hank Shaw:

I talk about food in every episode, and I don’t know. Can you mess up a sooty grouse? I guess you could cook the heck out of it.

Forrest Bowers:

[crosstalk 01:06:04] overcook it. Yeah. [crosstalk 01:06:06]

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. You could overcook the breast, it would be chalky, but that’s more technique.

Rick Merizon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. Really, a pan-roasted bird, like you would do a whole roasted chicken? Man, that’s a beautiful meal. It’s amazing, and it’s so simple and easy.

Hank Shaw:

Do you brine your birds when you do that?

Forrest Bowers:

I do. Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

About an eight-hour overnight brine, or just a couple hours?

Forrest Bowers:

Overnight brine, and if I’ve got an apple or a pear in the kitchen, I’ll slice that, put it in the brine. Maybe peppercorns, maybe some whole allspice. Just something along those lines, to add… And orange, slice an orange.

Hank Shaw:

They have oranges in Alaska?

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

I’m looking out my back window, and I’ve got an orange tree in my backyard, so you know.

Forrest Bowers:

That sounds nice.

Hank Shaw:

Here’s a tip on those whole roasted birds. After you brine them… Incidentally, if you’re listening to this and you don’t know why you would brine a bird, brining anything allows it to retain more moisture when it’s cooked. That’s why you do this with very lean birds, because I’ve never seen a really fat grouse. I don’t know if you guys have.

Forrest Bowers:

Not really. No.

Rick Merizon:

No. Mm-mmm (negative).

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. They tend to be pretty lean. The other trick, after you brine them, is sit them on a rack or sitting otherwise upright, uncovered, in the refrigerator, for a day. If you can do this, if you have the time, what it does is it dries out the skin, because the refrigerator’s fairly dry, and cold enough to not hurt the meat at all. Then when you roast it, the skin gets crispy, crispy, crispy. The brine can sometimes hurt your ability to have crispy skin.

Forrest Bowers:

Right.

Hank Shaw:

I can tell you the single greatest thing, and this is true of sooty grouse, this is true of duskies, pheasants, really every chicken-like bird. If you’re listening to this and you hunt any chicken-like bird, this includes jake turkeys as well, the skin, whether it’s on the bird or not, crispy fried, and then chopped up and put into tacos is the single greatest thing you’re ever going to eat. You’re welcome.

Rick Merizon:

Delicious.

Hank Shaw:

Chicken-skin tacos are a thing, and so as hunters we can create that same effect with really any chicken-like bird. It works really, really well.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. I’ll bring my birds up to room temperature before I roast them, and I’m trying to get that drying effect, to help with the crisping.

Hank Shaw:

You would want to do both. So if you do the refrigerator dry, that dries them out, and then bringing them to room temperature is a very good point, because otherwise you can get this weird black-and-blue thing.

Forrest Bowers:

Right.

Hank Shaw:

If you’re looking for an interior temperature, for those of you who are temperature inclined, you want the breast to be about 148, 145 when you pull it. So that sounds too cool, but it’s not, because it’s going to bump up another five to seven degrees, and what that does, is it will give you perfect breast meat, and then the meat of the legs and the thighs will be a little under but still okay. Your alternative is to pull the breast at 150, and no warmer than 155, because it’s still going to carry up, and you get a better happy medium between breast meat that’s not destroyed and leg and thigh meat that’s still good if you pull at about 155.

Forrest Bowers:

Do you start your oven at a very high temperature and then come off of that for most of the-

Hank Shaw:

Yes.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Hank Shaw:

Or I’ll do the other. Either way works. You can either have the oven low, I’m talking 300, and then wait for the breast to hit maybe 140, so you’ve got a little bit of leeway. You pull the bird out of the oven, and then you jack that oven up to like 500 degrees or however hot it goes. Your bird’s out of the oven so it’s not experiencing that increase in the heat. So then when your oven resets to that high temperature, then you put it back in the oven to crisp the skin. That technique I find to be better than high heat first, because if you do that high heat first, then you still pretty much have to take the bird out of the oven, because otherwise you could face a problem if you’re not watching it. That said, if you go high heat first and then drop the heat, if you’re watching it, you can catch it before the temperature gets too high. Either way works.

Forrest Bowers:

Right. Okay.

Hank Shaw:

Last thing I want to go through before we let you go is, if a guy wanted to go grouse hunting, say you’re listening to this in Missouri or Maine or Arizona, if a guy wanted to go grouse hunting in Alaska, how would you go about telling an out-of-stater to do it?

Rick Merizon:

From my perspective, this is a critter that is a great opportunity for sort of a DIY hunt. I think the hardest thing is just the physicality of the hunt is challenging. I think that’s probably one of the single biggest challenges from my estimation. This is a bird that really demands a certain degree of physical prowess in terms of negotiating the landscape to get close enough to the bird for a shot. Shoot, you can fly to almost any major community in Southeast Alaska. Juneau, Petersburg, Ketchikan. Rent a vehicle. Most of these communities have hotels you can stay in.

You can stop into your local fish and game office and ask about access, road access, most of which is wide open. The US Forest Service has jurisdiction over most of the lands in Southeast Alaska, and as a result, most of those roads that they create are open for public access. They also do a great job of creating trails, hiking trails, in many of these communities, so it affords really good access into the backcountry.

Then it just comes down to like what Forrest was talking about, how you just start early in the morning, get up, get up in the trail system, and just start listening for birds, knowing that they’re going to be up near that treeline zone that he was identifying. Typically in Southeast Alaska that’s between 1500 feet and maybe 2000 feet. And knowing that you’re likely going to have to hike up out of the valley bottom to get up to those birds. From my opinion I think this is a pretty great opportunity for people to travel to Alaska, have a unique adventure on their own, and really have a reasonable chance of success. I think the big thing, like I said, is just the physicality that these birds demand.

Hank Shaw:

What about bears? Do you have to worry about bears?

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. There are bears around in all the areas where you’re sooty grouse hunting. I’ve never run into any bears when I’ve been out hunting, but I’ve certainly seen bear tracks and bear sign. Here, say for example in the Juneau area, on the mainland, we have both black and brown bears, but then if you move out, say, to Admiralty Island, a nearby island, there’s just brown bears there. You could see either, depending on where you’re hunting.

Hank Shaw:

People from the Lower 48 worry about bears the way that I have found Alaskans to worry about sharks. Like, our mutual friend Tyson is deathly afraid of sharks when I’ve lived around sharks my whole life, and I’m deathly afraid of grizzly bears and he’s like, “Eh, they’re fine.”

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah. I mean, you could carry some bear spray. If a person had concerns about bears, bear spray or a more powerful firearm than you would use for sooty grouse as bear protection. But really, the odds of having an adverse encounter when you’re out grouse hunting are pretty low.

I agree with Rick. This is a great hunt for a person who wanted to come up and experience small game hunting in Alaska. The access is good. I think one of the biggest challenges is certainly the terrain. The weather, just being prepared for this colder, wet environment that we have here, and the challenging terrain. I’ve gotten myself into some spots grouse hunting where I was quite concerned about my safety. You can get into some really steep cliff terrain quickly.

Hank Shaw:

Crazy.

Forrest Bowers:

Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

When’s the time period? When would people think about coming?

Forrest Bowers:

I’ll typically do my first hunt around the end of March, and I usually never hear a bird then, but I always go just to see what’s going on, start getting out in the woods. I typically will start hearing birds in early April and have my best hunting the last week of April, first week of May. And then of course the season ends May 15.

Hank Shaw:

Gotcha.

Forrest Bowers:

The other thing that a person could do is combine a grouse hunt with a steelhead trip in Southeast.

Hank Shaw:

Ah. Steelies.

Forrest Bowers:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, so we have good steelhead fishing in many of the areas where you’d be grouse hunting. Nearby, anyway.

Hank Shaw:

That is a cool combo.

Rick Merizon:

It’s a really interesting species, and it’s super fun to hunt. It’s one of my favorites here in Alaska.

Forrest Bowers:

And the other cool thing about the Juneau area, and you know, you’ve been up in, like, Taku Inlet, right, Hank? You’ve been up there with Tyson?

Hank Shaw:

Oh yeah.

Forrest Bowers:

So in the Taku river drainage, there’s also ruffed grouse there. There is an area there where sooty grouse and ruffed grouse overlap, which to me is pretty fascinating that that happens in Alaska. That’s a unique occurrence. It might happen in the Stikine drainage down by Petersburg as well, but that’s a pretty cool little habitat niche.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah, especially in the spring. They overlap a lot in Oregon, Washington, and northern California.

Well, cool. You’ve got me psyched to go out there and chase hooters.

Forrest Bowers:

Hit me up next time you’re in Juneau.

Hank Shaw:

All right. Thank you guys for being on the podcast. I will put a lot of extensive things in the show notes: links to recipes and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game pages about the grouse and licensing information all kinds of general bird nerditry.

Rick Merizon:

Yeah, and I might add, too, just really quickly, if it’s all right, being a small game program coordinator I get a lot of calls from hunters. By all means, if folks are listening to this and are intrigued or are intrigued about other upland bird opportunities here in Alaska, by all means give me a shout. That’s why we’re here, is to help hunters and to help regulate the population. I always love chatting with folks about hunting and getting them squared away on their dream trip if that’s something they’re trying to do.

Hank Shaw:

Absolutely. Should I leave your e-mail address in the show notes?

Rick Merizon:

Yeah. You can leave my email or my work phone number. Absolutely.

Hank Shaw:

I will do that.

Rick Merizon:

Great.

Hank Shaw:

Take it easy, guys, and thanks for being on the Hunt Gather Talk podcast.

Rick Merizon:

Thanks.

Forrest Bowers:

Thanks, Hank.

Hank Shaw:

That’s it for another episode of the Hunt Gather Talk podcast, sponsored by Filson and Hunt to Eat. I’m your host, Hank Shaw, and I wanted to ask a favor of you. We are trying to spread the word about the Hunt Gather Talk podcast, and I need your help to do that. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard so far, and I am wondering if you guys can help spread the word by sharing and spreading the word about this podcast through social media and any other means that you think might get somebody who is interested in hearing about what we’re talking about to know about the show. Word of mouth is super important. It helps me a lot.

Hank Shaw:

And the other thing that does help, believe it or not, it helps more than you might think, is to leave a review of the podcast on whatever platform that you listen to the podcast from, iTunes or Stitcher or Spotify or anything like that. Those reviews help a lot. Again, I’m Hank, and you can always find me on social media at Hunt Gather Cook on Instagram, on my website, which is Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, and you can find that on huntgathercook.com, and I also run a private Facebook group called Hunt Gather Cook. Let me know that you listen to the podcast, and I will let you in. Once again, thanks a lot for all your help spreading the word about the podcast. It helps a lot, and I will talk to you in a little bit with another episode on another upland bird that we can find here in North America. Thank you, thank you so much for listening, and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

 

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About Hank Shaw

Hey there. Welcome to Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, the internet’s largest source of recipes and know-how for wild foods. I am a chef, author, and yes, hunter, angler, gardener, forager and cook. Follow me on Instagram and on Facebook.

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6 Comments

  1. I hunt Sootys up in Nevada and I have pretty good luck! I’m one of the guys you didn’t think exist that have shot Sootys in the air with a shotgun! It takes a lot of walking and I don’t use a dog. Normally I’m hunting alone just walking through the forest and staying alert near water. Evenings seem to be best. I rarely see males, normally all females. My goal this season is to get a limit day (3).

  2. WOW, I’ve listened to the first twenty minutes and can make an argument to almost every topic.
    No wonder it took so long to make a split between the “blue grouse” species.
    I’ve been hunting back logging roads (Fraser canyon) and one corner has a smaller darker (coastal) “blue” then the next a typical big (interior) powder blue chested “blue”.
    This is in B.C. and even in some of the coastal range I’ve seen the sooties and duskies on the same mountain just at different elevations.
    Is their a subspecies on the islands? Years ago a friend and I shot over 20 “blues” on a Gulf island while deer hunting. These were smaller than mainland/interior birds, as well as darker. They tended to act and occupy the habitat of ruffed grouse (no ruffies around).
    Always been fascinated with these birds and have worn out alot of boot leather traipsing around the hills looking for them (ala Steve Rinella).
    Only other bird that comes close is the northern sharp tails. Hunted in old burns or logging slashes.

  3. Hey Hank, this episode is awesome! I am proudly a grouse hunter in Northcentral Washington. We are lucky as hell to have multi species days on the regular, ubiquitously know as thunder chickens. We’re all making grouse confit since bastardizing your recipes. Keep it up man. What you are doing is special.

  4. Hank enjoyed the topic and podcast. This was my 2nd foray….enjoyed the podcast on snowflake/ptarmigan too. Lived and worked in Tulare Cty, CA for 9 years. Hunted blue grouse rather successfully. Can provide some insights for these critters in southern Sierra’s. Thanks! It was fun!

  5. You’re another brother, from a different mother! I live in CO & hunt to eat! I measured 10 of the 30 tail fans I’ve saved (I limit out EVERY season of Dusky grouse) I’ve killed more than I can count, and most are 18 tail feathers. I found an occasional 19 feather fan, and some with less. Curious, I never thought to count them until listening to your pod cast.

  6. I love your enthusiasm, care and knowledge of the natural world. I’m in my 80s now and cannot get out into the woods as much. I live in the city limits of Bessemer, Alabama and shooting in the city limits is against the law. But I shoot squirrels, with many precautions, right in my backyard…and with knowledge of the neighbors. We have huge, granddaddy pecan trees that produce thousands of pecans annually and until a few years ago, we all had attic infestations of squirrels. My campaign against squirrels started with a vengeance 11 years ago. Since 2009, I have killed 838 squirrels. And there are still plenty of the little twitchy-tailed nut-grabbers in my neighborhood. PS: FYI, it is estimated that squirrels cause in excess of $2billion a year in damage to the electrical grid from shorting transformers and they are the primary cause of fires that start in the attic of houses. They have to chew. And they chew on wiring. paul davis, bessemer, al