doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Not just for the grouse guys

Smith’s oil at the top of this article is magnetic to me. But it’s the article that is too good to just be let disappear into the magazine stack. I imagine all of us have a similar enduring memory of a special day in a special place (maybe many) and if it’s long ago, the same concern as the author:

“Maybe it’s better that I don’t know what’s happened there over the years and that I assume the old chimney is still standing sentinel over that wonderful bird cover where grouse forage on drops from the old apple trees and roost in the big white pines…”

https://sportingclassicsdaily.com/snow-grouse/

In my life those kind of memories often come back as remembrances of "the graveyard covey". So often an old, overgrown graveyard would be part of the cover for a covey of 'buhds", bobwhites. There would so very often also be a single rabbit in the nearby vicinity.

Grandad quipped that the luckiest charm you could carry in your pants pocket was the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit.

I’ve never hunted ruffed grouse in the east.

That said, it would seem that in the east ruffed grouse are associated with either agriculture, or, the remains of what once was agriculture, abandoned farms, especially. Some of my best hunting is in areas of Pine and Aiken counties that were logged off at the turn of the last century, and then mostly forgotten about, save for periodic paper mill logging. There is a bit of evidence that people attempted to farm, but, scant evidence that it was worth the effort. Red pine and aspen do well in soil you can’t even grow vegetables in, and much of those two counties fall into that description.

The good news is if the state owns it, you can pretty much hunt it. The bad news is the state owns most of those two counties, and they are poor. One thing to hunt there, another entirely to live in an area that looks as if anything of value was scraped off a long time ago.

Best,
Ted

Where I grew up in NW Pennsylvania it looks alot like this lovely rendering in early winter. The abandoned farms and little homes were there too and we hunted around many of them as younger men. It was already a "resistant pocket of depression" by the time I graduated high school in 1976 and that particular malady only seems to have deepened since my departure from there in the middle 1980s.

Access to many of those places is no-longer available because so-much of it is posted now. That sense of a community's use of a "shared resource" is overshadowed now by a fear of "liability" (& perhaps by some previous bad behavior). Bird populations there have also plummeted for a number of reasons. West Nile Virus was blamed heavily by the State Game Commission but the numbers had already been badly-reduced before that particular pestilence became generally known there.

I always wondered about how wild turkey populations affected the ruffed grouse populations in the coverts of my boyhood home (because as one gained population the other seemed to lose) but I have by told by several "experts" now that my observations were merely a coincidence.

Oh well...

ditto...

Thanks for the kind words FallCreekFan. It's a true story that occurred about 45 years ago. Like so many of the overgrown Appalachian abandoned farms of that era, I'm guessing that Stone City is now mature forest (hopefully not developed) and no longer good grouse cover.

A rare and pleasant experience to be able to thank the author personally for a fine story well told.

And a second thanks for the power of your writing to surface our own special memories.

wonderful images...

That picture reminds me of a place we called "Windy City". All that remains there now are sidewalks and non-native plants and trees.