Chasing Shadows

From our November/December 2025 Issue

It started years ago when I flushed a large blue-gray bird while walking a high mountain trout stream. That was my first glimpse of a dusky grouse. All I had in my hand that day was a 3-weight fly rod, but the memory of that bird remained with me, and I told myself that someday I’d hunt dusky grouse in the cool shadows of tall mountains.

But I was a confirmed prairie rat, and for as long as I’d been chasing dogs chasing birds, September 1 had meant prairie birds: Kansas prairie chickens, Nebraska sharptails, Wyoming sage grouse, Montana Huns. Those strange, mysterious birds of the mountain meadows and dark timber were never able to draw me away from the plains.

In the end it took a series of brutally hot prairie-grouse openers to convince me that I should finally follow up on that long-ago promise and seek dusky grouse in the comparative coolness of the mountains.

So I cracked open a map to see where I might find the closest mountain grouse. The rugged, high peaks of northern New Mexico could be reached in a day’s drive from my home in Oklahoma, so I loaded up the dogs, pointed the truck west and drove into the unknown.

That was some years ago, but my first trip to the mountains and the shadow birds they held was a revelation for this flatlander. And since that first hunt I have returned to New Mexico almost every year, forsaking the early-season sun and heat of the prairie in favor of cool mornings, quiet shadows and surprisingly challenging birds.

The dusky grouse, native to higher elevations of the Rocky Mountains, is a somewhat underutilized and underappreciated upland bird, owing to both the terrain it inhabits and its purported lack of wariness. In fact, reading about the dusky’s alleged cluelessness around humans, you’d be forgiven for thinking it might be more appropriate to hunt the birds with a slingshot than with a shotgun.

And while duskies do tend to behave differently than prairie grouse, reports of their gullibility are, if not greatly overstated, then at least a bit exaggerated.

Last fall I once again headed west to meet a good friend for my annual excursion to the mountains. Driving in, I was reminded that chasing dusky grouse can feel more like a Western big-game hunt than a bird hunt. My drive started as a gradual ascent up a relatively well-maintained road at about 6,500 feet and terminated in a twisting, barely navigable two-track at almost 10,000 feet. Aspens shook in the breeze, the unmistakable sound of bugling elk rang through the valleys and there was a definite feel of fall in the air.

After setting up camp, cooking dinner and sharing traditional bird camp gin & tonics, my friend Stephanie Walton and I sat by the campfire reminiscing about old hunts, old dogs and old friends while mapping out a plan for the next day. I had met Stephanie, a hardcore upland hunter, years earlier through our common interest in upland conservation, and we had shared many hunts since then. Under a sky filled with stars, we fell asleep dreaming of blue-gray bombshells speeding through the trees.

The next morning we woke early and cooked a proper camp breakfast, and while we were eating watched in awe as a bull elk herded a small group of cows through an aspen grove below camp. As they disappeared into the trees, I wondered how many elk hunters had left camp in the dark, wee hours only to walk right by what they were seeking.

After breakfast we readied ourselves and the dogs and set out directly from camp. Long experience had taught us to take the first hunt at a moderate pace in order to get used to the elevation and terrain. We would cover miles that day, but we would cover them slowly, without killing ourselves.

As with all gamebirds, knowing a little about the quarry and their needs and preferences goes a long way toward actually finding them. The trick with duskies is to determine the elevation gradient and primary food source they are on at the time, and then to stick with them. So we focused on spots in the 8,500- to 10,000-foot range and tried to cover a wide variety of vegetation types and covers, from timbered draws interspersed with small isolated meadows to larger, more-open valleys and mountainsides.

Dusky grouse spend the summer and early fall across a wide variety of habitats and elevations, reflecting the impressive diversity of foods they eat at this time of year. Seeds, berries, insects, greens, leaves, shoots—pretty much anything a dusky can find this time of year, it will eat. So following the rule “find the food, find the birds” when the birds are eating virtually everything can be tough.

Still, there will be some indicators. Dusky grouse are known for their somewhat counterintuitive “reverse migration.” While they spend summer and fall at lower elevations fattening up on the easy pickings of insects, greenery and berries, as winter approaches and those food sources start to disappear, duskies begin migrating higher to feed on the evergreen trees that will sustain them through winter.

Seeing as we were hunting in early September, it seemed reasonable to assume that most of the grouse would still be low, hitting the insects and berries. So that’s where we decided to concentrate our energies. I put the Garmin collar on my oldest pointer and let her go.

Running dogs in the mountains presents a really good mix of terrain, from long, sweeping valley sides where the dogs can stretch out for hundreds of yards to tight, confined dark-timber draws interspersed with meadows and dense aspen stands where they shorten up to a few yards like on an Eastern ruffed grouse hunt.

From camp, we walked into an area that looked like prime grouse country: a high, seeping mountain valley ringed with timber and interspersed with aspen stands and thick, brushy finger draws.

My pointer, working in cadence with Stephanie’s young setter, began weaving in and out of quaking aspens and across the grassy meadows and tentatively venturing into the first few yards of the timber, as the pair got used to the topography. Grasshoppers flew ahead of us as we walked, and everything looked like a grouse salad bar.

But it was in the trees where we got our first point. Stephanie’s setter locked up 300 yards into the timber, and when we got there, we found a rock-solid setter on one side of a tiny half-acre meadow surrounded by evergreens and a big, stonestill dusky grouse on the other side. As Stephanie walked in on the point, the grouse blew out, accelerated as it juked its way through the timber and was gone.

It was an impressive bit of flying that reinforced the fact that duskies are deceptively fast, powerful and canny fliers when the mood strikes them, and if you are hunting in an area where they’ve felt hunting pressure, chances are that mood strikes them often.

A few minutes later this was demonstrated when the dogs went on point at the base of a pine tree, with both dogs looking straight up. As we approached, we didn’t know if there was a grouse in the tree somewhere or if the dogs were pointing a porcupine or perhaps something larger . . . and with teeth. About then the grouse swiftly exited the other side of the pine and was gone before either of us could shoulder our guns. Clearly this was a gamebird and not some dummy one step removed from barnyard fowl.

Later that afternoon, following lunch at camp and a break to let our legs recover, we got back after it. As we walked amongst a mixed-growth area of aspens and open shrubs at the base of a tall ridge, my pointer Abbey started working scent and then plunged into a thick stand of young aspens at the beginning of what looked to be an old logging road winding up the steep side of the ridge.

I followed her into the enveloping aspens, and as they swallowed me, the Garmin’s on-point alarm sounded and showed me that Abbey was 20 yards ahead. Ten yards later I finally made it through a wall of head-high saplings and spotted Abbey rock-solid just as several dusky grouse flushed from the ground ahead of her.

I shouldered my gun, tried to swing, hit a limb with the barrels, swore and then tried to swing again on a shadowy figure cutting through the canopy. I shot on instinct and sound as much as sight, and as aspen leaves fluttered down, I heard a thud. A moment later I heard Stephanie shoot to my left at a late flusher. Then Abbey came into sight holding the first bird of the trip.

As I exited the dense stand of aspens holding my bird, I noticed Stephanie taking one from her setter’s mouth. Two shots, two birds. It was a good start to what would be an even better day. We found grouse in the aspens; we found grouse on the sunny, grasshopper-covered slopes of hillsides above and below the aspens; and we found grouse in the timber. It was so early in the season with so much food and cover to choose from that the birds were widely dispersed. Back at camp we examined the crops of the grouse we’d shot. The contents were as varied as the areas where we’d found the birds.

That evening, with fresh grouse breasts sizzling on the grill, we cracked open a bottle of wine and raised a toast to the gray ghosts of the mountains and the successful start of another northern New Mexico big-game camp.