Hunting & Heritage
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10/06/2026
Penance
Hunting the sharptails of October, and beyond
by Tom Carpenter
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Where sharp-tailed grouse live, and when they mostly get hunted, the September prairie smacks of summer but beckons of autumn.
Scattered in the shortgrass, wild coneflowers and yellow daisies and black-eyed Susans hang on in honor of summer that still is. Short goldenrod, bunchy asters and yellow sunflowers bloom in bravery against fall frosts sure to come.
Buffaloberries, chokecherries, rose hips and wild plums abound, hanging with colored-up fall foliage in the moist draws and on some protected hillsides, for grouse to flutter up and eat, or scratch up in the shade below.
Skies are largely blue. The air is warm, sometime too much so for human comfort and canine safety, a challenge solved by hunting early in the day or, on occasion, the last hour or so.
All in all, it is indeed a fine and purely pleasant time to hunt Tympanuchus phasianellus. Getting out early in the season for birds. Walking and walking. Seeing what the dog has going after a summer of work or not-so-much. Wearing mere shirtsleeves and light hiking boots. Wandering far and wide and free, where horizons don't matter.
My light sweater shed long ago, for the morning is now on the cusp between the coolness of a long September night and the sun starting to approach its zenith for the day, Lark and I are wandering our way back to the car.
We work up a swale filled with snowberry, those little calf-high shrubs that offer shade for grouse, room to run and, if they didn't get their crops filled up earlier, a few nasty, peppery-tasting snowberries and perhaps some grasshoppers to finish off breakfast. Grouse like snowberry patches for the cover more than the food value therein.
I know her. I know the gaits. She has birds scented. And they are moving.
Her ground-eating lope is gone, replaced with the caution and care of steps that become increasingly slow and dainty and interspersed with pauses until she locks one, two, three times and then a fourth for good.
Onward I go, past. A few birds zoom up, just on the edge of range. She stays. I continue. The popcorn starts popping. One bird down. Then a second. It is all we need.
She goes for one, I the other. We meet at her bird, for that is outlined in our contract, and I hold both up, both happy and sad inside me. Young ones.
Of course the dog work was good, she doing what she was born to do. And the light-breasted, young grouse will be grand to eat, perhaps the grandest gamebird of all in the pan. Yes.
But I yearn for the heft of what I know a sharptail can be. Like the other one in my vest. Like every bird of October, and beyond.
September sharptail hunting's bread and butter is the family covey. Families like to stay together. But sometimes the birds spread out a little too much for their own good. Many are inexperienced, and make mistakes.
All of this helps us get good dog work, and bag birds. Nothing wrong, and everything right, with all that.
As I have no qualms shooting a young rooster early in that hunting season, I have no qualms about shooting young grouse. But, about a decade into a love affair with sharptails that is now going past 40 years, I started to give a kitchen pass to birds that were noticeably small and clearly innocent.
Of course, kitchen passes don't always work 100%. Sometimes you just get too excited, or want a bird too bad, or the dog worked so good that you just up and shoot. It happens. It's fine.
But I decided to pay some annual penance for what I sometimes did to the birds in September. Especially the small, young ones. That meant going out to hunt sharptails on-purpose in October, the later the better for paying a full price. And sometimes, November.
When the coveys get even bigger, as they do as winter nears, sharptails get more flighty, with more eyes to keep watch and ears to listen, from sparser-by-the-day vegetation. Every bird has experience under its belt. Popcorn birds are rare if not absent altogether.
Now, in a day of hunting, a decent shot at a now wild-ass covey is success. A bird in hand, a feat indeed. And Lord help me, a brace of grouse, big and round and fat and ready for winter, a rare triumph.
I pay this penance with miles, with wind-burned cheeks, with fingers slowed by cold instead of sweating inside of gloves, and with the specter of “maybe just maybe” instead of “when” it will happen.
The dog, she doesn't care one whit what we hunt when, as long as we hunt. And she too prefers the cold. So we go.
Of course, it is late October now. In fact, the same nameless big place at which we shot the young popcorn birds of earlier in this story, though the year is different, as is the hunting.
We perform a couple hours of preliminary penance in the lee rolls of ground up top, where swells of prime pasture ground, not touched by cattle since spring, spread far and wide.
The wind blows hard straight from the north out of Canada. Scudding clouds spit a few snow flurries. My ball cap would not stay on were not the survival necessity of a stocking cap holding it down.
One hour. Two. It is cold enough that the dog could run, and I could walk, all day. The birds are just not here, or their scent too dispersed, but I know it is the latter.
So we head toward where I figure they might be — a series of breaks cut with deep coulees, draining from east to west, where a bird could get out of the north wind.
We hunt them carefully, south to north or north to south, traversing each one east or west, on the lee side out of the brunt of the wind, before crossing to the next and repeating the drill.
There are a lot of coulees here. Finally, well over an hour later, in the second- or third-to-last cut, Lark gets birdy. I can tell she has no strong idea of where the grouse are in the swirls of wind even down here.
She casts, works, tries and repeats, finally finding something she likes from the spine above, and over the top she goes.
Crap. I scramble. Too late. Here they come. Luck: They are rocketing with the wind north-to-south, back over me, thirty grouse If there is one. Buzzing like white-bellied jets across the window of gray sky above.
I swing up, pick the last bird in the formation, pull past with a prayer, and slap the trigger. Miraculously, the bird tumbles down right toward me. I instinctively step aside, and it hits the ground with a real thud, and I mean a real thud, five feet away. After all that trying.
I let Lark find it, for she managed to hear me shoot, and we sit down to admire the bird. I am mesmerized. My hands shake. She licks blood from the one BB that caught the bird in the head, and then is like: Big deal, let's go.
But it is a big deal. The bird is practically the size of a bowling ball. Fully plumed. Long tail. Yellow eye combs indicating a cock, and purplish sac when you peel back the neck feathers. What I would fashion as a Real Bomber. A sharptail of October.
The rest of the birds went east, into the shallower headlands of the coulees; I know it because I chanced a look, something out of my norm when a bird is down, after it thumped into my lap.
Lark's paws and heart rested and my hands steady again, we rise up, head that way, and serve a couple more hours of penance with the scattered covey, the birds jumpier than ever now that they were spread out and on a hair trigger in the wind.
The sharptails of October almost always have it their way.
I have also hunted sharptails on purpose in November; and even managed to shoot a couple in December on pheasant hunts, which leads me to want to try the December sharptail-focused hunt that has always addled the back of my mind as, perhaps, an extreme form of stoic penance for hunting innocent birds in the pleasantness of September.
In September, you walk the glorious prairie for sharptails. In October and beyond, you are a sharptail hunter.
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