The sharptail’s range extends from as far east as Wisconsin to as far north as Alaska. (Photo courtesy of Shutterstock)
September 23, 2024
By Andrew McKean
I had just about given up on finding birds. After a frosty September morning, the eastern Montana prairie was turning hot. My dog was tuckered, and I was thirsty and a little frustrated that I had turned up only one sharp-tailed grouse on a miles-long walk across wheat stubble and down a coulee of berry and wild plum patches.
Because it was in line with my return to the pickup, I cast my dog into the scraggly trees of a derelict shelter belt, the only remnant of a long-abandoned prairie homestead. Almost immediately, a sharpie busted from the shade of a caragana. I was caught unprepared, and that first bird sailed away into the blue September air. But the wild flush energized my dog, and she pulled me into the shady heart of the shelterbelt.
The wind-stunted elms and Russian olives came to life as a 20-bird flush filled the prairie air. I doubled on the rise, then reloaded and waited as Nellie worked taller grass for the inevitable hard-holders. Sure enough, a grouse rocketed out of the crested wheatgrass and I was done, my four-bird limit riding in my vest. After 3 hours of mostly empty hiking, three-fourths of my limit came in about 8 seconds of action.
That’s the nature of sharptails, the most widespread and abundant of our Western prairie grouse and my pick for the most rewarding, surprising, remarkable and accessible of our prairie upland birds.
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Part of the appeal of sharptails is their elasticity. They can just as easily be found in rank CRP grasslands as they can in the middle of an endless field of spring wheat. They can congregate in mid-elevation brush patches just below aspen and elk, or they can be found in the tall cottonwoods of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers and their larger tributaries. They’re residents of public land, mainly that managed by the BLM, but they’re also frequently found on private parcels enrolled in public-hunting programs like Montana’s Block Management areas.
Another part of sharptails’ charm is their behavior. Their signature chuckle as they flush is the very sound of the prairie for me. They are strong fliers, but not especially explosive flushers, which makes them fairly easy for mortal shotgunners to hit. They go down reliably, unlike tough old prairie roosters that can take several pellets, hit the ground running and be hard to retrieve. And sharpies are simply beautiful, feathered in distinctive patterns of every shade of gray that camouflage them in each of the dozens of seasons and terrains you’ll encounter on the prairie.
EARLY-SEASON TACTICS While I associate sharptails with the shortgrass prairie of my eastern Montana homeland, the species has one of the widest distributions of our native game birds. You can find remnant populations as far east as Wisconsin, and northern Minnesota has a popular season for what I’d call boreal forest sharptails.
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The best advice for early-season sharpies is simply to log as many miles as possible. Comfortable, lightweight gear is essential. (Photo by author) But it’s the Dakotas, eastern Montana, southern Canada and south into Wyoming where sharptails thrive. You’ll find small and often protected populations as far south as Utah, west into interior British Columbia and north to Alaska. They can make a living on native range, but they prefer a mix of small grains and brushy prairie draws and stream bottoms. Like most grouse, they like edges, whether that’s the margin between a wheat field and a patch of buckbrush or a moist slough and grassy uplands. You won’t go wrong if you target edge habitat no matter the season, and the bonus is that you will often encounter Hungarian partridge in open habitats and ring-necked pheasants in the tighter cover.
Most prairie grouse seasons open in early September, when conditions on the Northern Plains are typically hot and dry. Sharptails, and to a lesser extent their cousins the sage grouse, will be found around both water and shade. They don’t need much, just the low cover of snowberries or buffalo berries or the sparse canopy of old shelterbelts as described above. Before a killing frost, you’ll also find sharptails anywhere you find large concentrations of grasshoppers. In the last couple of drought years in the Dakotas and Montana, that’s actually been a problem, since grasshoppers have been so widespread and abundant that it can be hard to pinpoint where to find grouse.
Obviously, a wide-ranging pointing dog can increase your odds of encounters, especially in big blocks of CRP or mid-height grasslands, but even close-working Labs and setters are useful to push birds. But the beauty of early-season sharpies, for hunters with dogs or without, is that they neither flush especially wild nor hold especially tight. Instead, they generally get edgy when hunters are about 50 yards out.
The other generous feature of sharp-tailed grouse is that, as I experienced in the opening scene, they generally don’t all flush at once. Especially in the early season, when family groups include young-of-the-year birds, many juveniles flush several seconds after the main covey flush, giving hunters time to prepare.
Because early-season sharptails live on either insects or spent grain from fall-harvested wheat and lentils, they tend to be excellent table fare. Later in the year, as birds transition to rosehips, Russian olive berries and hard mast, their flesh becomes darker and stronger tasting.
LATE-SEASON TACTICS Hunting late-season sharpies is an entirely different game than in September. By later in the season (Montana’s sharptail season extends through December) birds are gathered in large flocks, and the unwary young birds have been picked off. The survivors are nobody’s fool, flushing wild and rarely giving hunters a second chance.
Sharptails tend not to flush wild nor hold terribly tight, typically offering hunters, especially those with dogs, makable shots. (Photo courtesy of Shutterstock) Winter grouse concentrate around thicker cover. You often find them in the taller trees of larger prairie drainages, and you can often find them around cattails and thermal cover where you’d be more likely to encounter late-season roosters. While you can still have success without a dog, late-season sharpie hunting can be excellent with a Lab or Grif that works heavy cover and flushes hard-holding birds.
Another approach is to intercept high-flying transitional grouse. Ahead of cold fronts, prairie grouse will often fly in scattered groups between exposed benchland and protected bottoms. If you can get in the way of these movements, you can have pass-shooting that’s the prairie equivalent of an English driven pheasant shoot, with tall shots at straight-overhead incomers.
GUNS AND LOADS Choices vary from early to late season.
If sharptails are the everyman’s grouse, you don’t have to be particularly snobby about your sharptail gun. A beater pump-action will get the job done just as well, if not as fashionably, as a bespoke side-by-side.
A better way to look at the proposition is to match your gun with your hunting style. If you’re a long-walker in the early season, when birds aren’t yet wearing their winter plumage, a lightweight 20- or even 28-gauge is perfect. My go-to prairie grouse gun is Browning’s 20-gauge Citori , with 26-inch barrels and a 3-inch chamber. It carries nicely and can handle a wide range of payloads, from low-brass field loads for early-season birds to stout TSS and tungsten for longer shots at late-season grouse.
(Photo courtesy of Benelli) Last year I hunted with Benelli’s Super Black Eagle 3 in 28 gauge and was delighted with Winchester’s tried-and-true Super X High Brass No. 6 loads, along with its new Bismuth No. 5 shells. Winchester’s Super Pheasant is also an excellent late-season grouse killer.
(Photo courtesy of Winchester Ammunition) For later-season hunting, a 12-gauge loaded with high-brass lead or one of the trendy heavy metals is a good option to down wild-flushing birds that have heavy winter feathers.
(Photo courtesy of Heavy-Shot) Other payloads to consider, especially for treks that might also turn up prairie-pothole ducks, are Hevi-Shot’s Hevi-Hammer blend of bismuth and steel in No. 5 or Hevi-Hammer Dove in No. 7 for early-season grouse and teal. If you want to reach out for wild-flushing, heavily plumed December sharpies, it’s hard to beat Hevi-Bismuth No. 5 in 12-, 16- or 20-gauge.
PRAIRIE GROUSE KIT Key pieces of gear to have along.
There are a few pieces of kit that I’ve settled on over three decades of sharptail hunting that I won’t loan to even my best buddies. I’ll mix and match from this collection depending on the season.
(Photo courtesy of Filson) The first is my old Filson Tin Cloth Shooting Bag. It has two smaller pockets for shells and miscellany, including my dog’s e-collar controller, and the larger rear pocket is sized right for a water bottle or two or a half-limit of sharpies. If I get a full limit of four birds, I might be space-constrained, but the joy of this minimalist belt is that it doesn’t slow me down or heat me up like a full upland vest does.
(Photo by Danner) The second are my Danner Pronghorn boots. I’ve worn out three pairs of them on prairie grouse, but they are perfect for early-season jaunts that can take me 5 to 8 miles across a wide variety of terrain.
(Photo courtesy of Leatherman) I always carry my Leatherman multi-tool. I’ve gone through a lot of models over the years, but the minimalist Bond brings a good combination of reliability and talent-to-weight ratio. The needlenose pliers have plucked cactus spines from the pads of many dogs (not all mine) and can remove porcupine quills in a hurry.
This article was featured in the September 2024 issue of Game & Fish magazine. Click to subscribe .