Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Canada True Tail of Northern BC Spruce Grouse

Fellow Forum Folks;
Good morning to you all, I hope wherever and whenever this finds you reading my hunting tail/tale that you and yours are well.

Yesterday morning I was up on the local mountain with my neighbor in the pursuit of protein. Now he has tagged a mulie already and I've managed a small whitetail buck so we were looking for a mulie for myself, a whitetail buck for him or an elk for either one of us.

Anyways as things go sometimes, after we'd split up while I only managed to see 2 or perhaps 3 Spruce Grouse, he of course saw a couple mulie bucks - one a 2x4 which I'd gladly have invited home for dinner, but as well he saw a good number of Spruce Grouse.

All those grouse sightings reminded me of an excursion into the Telegraph Creek area back in '87 for mountain goats where my hunting partner and I were able to fill to legal capacity my sister's freezer with grouse and as well experience what to this day has been the most bizarre grouse hunting experience ever.

It should be said before going further that my sister and her husband as well as their eldest daughter who was perhaps 4 or 5 lived there in Telegraph, so were able to provide us with a warm place to crash and a base for our daily expeditions west of town for mountain goats.

There were that year and in that area, so many Spruce Grouse that if I begin to suggest numbers seen I'd be immediately taken for at very least a Federal politician or used car salesperson.... at very least.

The daily limit up there that year was 10 per day and after the first day where we returned with 20 birds we felt more than a little convicted of something akin to unsportsmanlike behavior. Sometime during that first evening then, "The Rules" were envisioned, the details of which I'll share now.

A points system of sorts was developed, since we were both very much males and young males at that and what is life without competition of some kind, you know? The arm of choice was a reasonably accurate Ruger 10/22 - but certainly not Brno or Tikka T1X level accurate arm, just a good example of an early '80's 10/22 running a 1" Bushnell 4X Sportview that had been purchased on sale at Prince's of Oroville for $29.95!

- A single point would be awarded for each Spruce Grouse shot "in the head or neck".

- A single point would be deducted for a miss.

- A single point would be deducted for a hit anywhere other than the head or neck of the grouse.

- The participants would take turns, so it didn't matter who spotted the grouse first, it was either your turn or not.

- The participant whose turn it was to shoot, had to wait until the participant who was not shooting, hopped out of the truck, loaded a single round into the magazine of the 10/22 and then handed the arm to the shooter who could then chamber a round and take his turn.

- If a miss occurred, the shooter then would be responsible for taking out the magazine, loading a single round into it, replacing it into the arm and then turning the arm over to the shooter whose turn it now was.

- If a hit was made, the loader's job was retriever since sometimes we'd have to wade through the Devils' Club for that task and it was agreed that would be standard procedure.

Now of course the perceptive and gentle reader can already ascertain that despite a presumably fair set of rules being established, the speed at which the loader proceeded with his task had a marked bearing on the success rate of the shooter....

Now to be clear, there were ample opportunities for each participant to maintain some semblance of balance when their respective turn came about... turnabout being fair play and all that.

So it was into this game of high stakes grouse points, my good friend and hunting partner took his turn and potted a Spruce Rooster from it's perch on a poplar tree, whereupon it fluttered to the ground.

Since the rules demanded I be retriever, I scrambled over the bank and looked down at the Spruce Grouse as it looked up at me.... whereupon I reached out and grabbed it and seeing as it was struggling greatly to be elsewhere in a great hurry I dispatched it by manual decapitation.

As I was walking back to the pickup, looking for the evidence of the hit - as we always did of course to both see how we were shooting and to ensure the rules were scrupulously being followed - I asked, "Where'd ya shoot him?"

He replied, "The eye most obviously, why didn't I hit there?"

Well, we then had the grouse undergo the most thorough field necropsy we were able to perform and finding no evidence of a hit anywhere on the head or neck of the bird, pronounced in our best coroner's inquest voice that the bird had in fact died of stupidity...

Now for those of you who may doubt this tale and my voracity, I can assure you that my friend and fellow Canuck forum member who occasionally visits here knows the shooter very well and perhaps has even heard this tail/tale from his lips as well. But anyways friends, true story, that's how it all went down.

Why the grouse fell out of the tree is still a mystery to us, but so help me there were no holes in it when I grabbed it.

I hope at very least some of you smiled a wee bit when reading the hunting story, thanks for doing so and allowing me to relive a grand hunt from long ago.

All the best to you all this fall.

Dwayne

PS;
Added a quick video of the road into Telegraph Creek to give you a flavor of the country up there.