Home Forums Birds & Dogs Upland Game Getting Ready for Bird Season????

Ruffed Grouse season in the northern counties begins Sept. 14th and Woodcock begins Sept. 21st. We wait until after the Bear season hunting with dogs is over, which is usually the 1st of October. Bear hounds, bird dogs and bears sometimes make for interesting encounters. The last few years we have encounters with wolves no matter what date we hunt.

My hunting pards and I like to shoot skeet year around to help our success ratio in bagging flushed birds.

What has changed for us is we used to chase a lot of grouse in the hills, but find the flat land of the north best suited for our current ages.

I feel your (joint) pain, roundoak. I USED to be a chukar hunter....

Bought an SKS/Ithaca M100 20ga SxSc IC/M for grouse and woodcock and a BRNO ZH204 (7x57R over 12ga) for grouse while deer hunting. Sold a nice M37 20ga with factory VR & IC choke.

SuperCub, I had a couple of those model 100's 20 g. when I was shooting doubles.. Nice guns, but the last one I had shot both barrels low..

I had a M200 for quite a while and was offered a very good trade on it for a shotgun I never used or in the end didn't like that much. I sold the trade and started looking for another SKB. I finally found one this spring and it won't be going anywhere if it shoots as well as the first.

Hope it does..they are nice handling guns.. The first I shot some game with it, but never patterned it.. Sold it to help make a hunt to Alaska in '81..

Shooting skeet with the bird guns, and running the dog.
Sept 1 is only 48 days away.

Looking forward to the upland season this year for the first time in a long while. Have been doing much more big game hunting, but we have a new vizsla pup and my daughter really wants to go out hunting with her. (It is technically her pup)

I am looking forward to some dove hunting soon.

Just picked up a Franchi Affinity 20ga. It will be my go to bird blaster this year. I was going to get a Montefeltro, but for a little more than $200 less the Affinity works...plus they didn't have any 20ga Monte's.

Less than 30 days now.. like 18 days..!!!!!! I need to shoot a bit of trap or skeet..

I thought it would be nice to extend the grouse hunting a bit into deer season so I was going to use this BRNO 7x57R/12ga for such.

Found the 12ga bbl was x-full, so it's back to the drawing board on that thought till I can get the choke opend up.

SuperCub, don't over look those spreader loads.. I bought 5 boxes from I think it was Polywad.. They turned my Ithaca 37 from a long range duck gun into a ruffed grouse gun.. They were reasonable, but shipping was a pain.. then you can shoot this fall and still have a long range gun!!

That's a good idea now. I'll look into that.

Checked out the farm yesterday AM- lots of doves feeding in the cut wheat. If weather holds for another couple of weeks, should be a great dove season in E. Colorado!

If I can get around better by then I hope to take the dogs and shotgun up to Wyo for a Sage chicken hunt and scout for Antelope as well.

I am looking forward to Sage Grouse as well. Actually I think I'm going to go after Sage boomers instead of Ptarmigan this year.

To the "oldsters" here: Oh, I hear ya! Those damn canyons in the Eastern Sierra's where I love to hunt the birds seem to be getting steeper! But, I just can't help myself; I just keep going after 'em. Fool that I am. Ain't it friggin' great?

And then there's the chukars that like lava beds....

Should be a nicer walk! Good luck!!!!!

Ohhh, you got that right!