I GUESS I should feel blessed that our foliage seems to hang on a little later than when I was a teenager. Even though I would say this year’s colors were average at best, it is still amazing eye candy. But it does come with a cost as it relates to bird hunting.
It’s hard enough to get a grouse to flush where you have a reasonable chance of getting a bead on it. If I hit one in three, I’m having a better than average day. And some days I don’t want to talk about my shooting percentages at all.
Add in the leaves still hanging on the trees and it is damn near impossible to even shoulder a gun before the grouse have vanished into the canopy. So when we got a sequence of hard freezes, I knew it would soon be time to take my shotgun for a walk. And sure enough, within a couple days, the landscape changed.
The mountains that yesterday still had color now had a bleak, grayish look of bare wood. Except for the oaks and some beeches, the leaves were on the forest floor. Now if I’m serious about trying to have a grouse or two for supper, I need to do some traveling.
For whatever reason, and I think there are many, there are very few grouse in my town of Shelburne. It’s not that they don’t exist. It’s just that their numbers are at historical lows.
As a teenager, I used to hunt the Androscoggin River bottomlands and go through a pocket of shells on a regular basis chasing a mixed bag of grouse, woodcock and an occasional snowshoe hare. Well, those days are gone, and they.
