Rare Air: Harvesting Three Upland Species in One Day

We’d just started to work the top part of the covert, where a few aspens mingle with some silky dogwoods, when my English setter Laurel went on point. As I walked in, a grouse flushed, and just as it started to angle behind a small white pine, I dropped it with one shot—my first Pennsylvania grouse of the 2024 season. It was a small, brown-phase male, likely a young-of-the-year bird. My day hunting on state game land was officially off to a great start.

We hunted through the rest of the covert along the small run dammed by beavers. Based on previous trips, I expected to find a pheasant or two. When we didn’t, we headed to a big field close to a cemetery where I hunted Laurel again. We worked down the right-hand side of the field toward the bottom, and on the way back she went on point as we neared the top of the hill. When the pheasant flushed from my right, I dropped it like a sack of potatoes—the second bird of a Pennsy Triple.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to bag a woodcock that day to complete the trifecta (I had an opportunity but missed). While two out of three ain’t bad, it’s not a Pennsy Triple if you don’t get each of the three species.

While taking a ruffed grouse, a woodcock and a pheasant in one day is not a common occurrence these days, the fact is it never was. Even when it was easier back in the 1960s and ’70s when there were a lot more wild birds, you still had to find them—and hit them.

GET YOUR GROUSE FIRST

One of the challenges in this noble pursuit is that these birds don’t generally occupy the same habitat. Another is that wild bird habitat is fragmented in Pennsylvania, which means you’re looking for small pockets of suitable habitat rather than larger, extended areas. It also means more homework is involved before you lace up the boots.

The most obvious choice of bird to start with is the grouse since they routinely require the most walking. Good grouse hunters burn a lot of energy finding enough birds to make it worthwhile, and even when you find one, that doesn’t mean you’ll get a decent shot at it. Unless you have a horseshoe charm, anticipate needing more than one encounter to get your ruff.

While grouse numbers in the state have been down for some time as the result of habitat loss and the effects of West Nile Virus, the good news is that, thanks to continued creation of early successional habitat by the Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC), grouse in the Keystone State are making a comeback. I’m always conscientious when I hunt them, but their recovery means that there are enough grouse out there to make chasing them worthwhile again. That’s a good thing.

Old clearcuts are a good place to start, especially if they’re above 2,000 feet in elevation where the effects of the West Nile Virus isn’t as noticeable. Look for tree trunks at least the size of broom handles up to baseball bat size. If you can find an old apple orchard, you might’ve found a honey hole for any grouse in the neighborhood. Remember that ruffs also need grit, so old logging roads where they can find it can be a good bet, especially in the late-afternoon magic hour of grouse hunting.

WALK UP A WOODCOCK

While grouse have a pretty diverse palate (for most of the year their diet consists of plant matter like acorns, buds and young stems), a woodcock’s principal food is earthworms. To find the birds, look for areas with a thicker stem density than is typical of grouse habitat. This means there will more of a canopy and the ground will be kept moist, which is good for worms. If it’s too dry, the worms won’t be there, and neither will the woodcock.

While there are places in Pennsylvania where suitable habitat for both ruffs and timberdoodles exists (i.e., a grouse covert that has some small streams or seeps to attract woodcock), it’s more likely you’ll have to find your woodcock in habitat specific to the needs of the species. If you can time your hunt to coincide with the fall migration, usually early to mid-November, you’ll increase your odds of bagging a woodcock exponentially since the main challenge in finding them is often their migratory nature. They’re either here or they’re not.

FINISH WITH PHEASANTS

While it may be hard to believe these days, up through the early 1970s there was a vibrant population of wild pheasants in Pennsylvania. In fact, the number of birds taken annually back then was close to the number of birds taken in each of the Dakotas. Simply put, Pennsylvania was pheasant country. These days, ringneck hunting is for stocked birds, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time.

To bag your pheasant, you’ll need to pay attention to the stocked areas. The PGC website offers a pheasant stocking map, which provides both the numbers of birds being stocked as well as a small window of dates when the stockings occur on each individual game land.

Obviously, if you hunt a stocked area within the first couple of days of a planting there will be more pheasants there, including more uneducated and easier to kill pheasants. If you want more of a challenge, find areas where birds were planted a couple weeks earlier. While they’re not as wily as wild birds, they’re surprisingly challenging to hunt. This is one of the nuances in the quest for the Pennsy Triple: You get to decide how tough you want to make the pheasant part of the quest.

Brian Pusch was able to bag his Pennsy Triple two years ago on public ground. “It was the last day of the season and I’d hunted all morning without finding a grouse,” says Pusch. “All of a sudden, my German Shorthaired Pointer, Hawken, went on point on a steep hillside. When the grouse flushed, I dropped it with my first shot. Five minutes later, he went on point again, and this time a woodcock got up, which I also dropped. It then occurred to me that all I needed for my triple was a pheasant, so I headed for a likely spot.

“They hadn’t stocked pheasants for a couple of weeks, so I wasn’t sure what we’d find, but in less than an hour, Hawken made two perfect points with two perfect retrieves and I had my first-ever Pennsy Triple. It took all day, I hunted a good eight hours to get it done, but it was worth the effort!”

That’s the short version of a long, successful day. A Pennsy Triple isn’t something a lot of hunters have done, but if you do your homework and put in the time, you just might be able to join their ranks.

HIT A TRIPLE

• How to start your search for the best place to hunt.

With more than 3.7 million acres of state forest land and state game land in Pennsylvania, there’s ample opportunity for hunting upland birds on public turf in the Keystone State. While you can find grouse, woodcock and pheasants across much of the state, for the best chance of bagging all three in one day, you need to narrow your scope.

The highest ruffed grouse flush rates per hour occur in the northwest and north-central regions of the state, and you’d be wise to focus your efforts there. First though, check out the Pennsylvania Game Commission website, where you can find maps of state game lands as well as the PA Hunting Interactive Map, which is a collaboration of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the PGC. You can use the various filters to narrow your search for the type of land you’re looking to hunt.

The same website provides information on each game bird, as well as info on where and when pheasant stockings occur. This will provide a good start in your quest for a Pennsy Triple.

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• This article was featured in the November 2025 issue of Game & Fish magazine. Click to subscribe.

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