Food, cover, water: the three things hunters look for when figuring out where to find upland birds (and mammals for that matter) on the landscape. Water is probably the easiest to judge with help of maps – do people still use maps? – or satellite imagery. Cover is a little trickier and bird-dependent. Sharptails often congregate in and under mature bush, like buck brush. Sage grouse, not surprisingly, like mature sage bush to hide under. They say pheasant like cattails, though whenever there is also other, less dense cover around, I’ve often found them there. Partridges, due their size, are happy with lower cover. Common theme here is that during the day birds generally don’t sit out in the open, waiting to get picked off by a hawk, so I tend to concentrate on whatever sticks out from the horizontal, whatever breaks up the monotony of the landscape.
Whenever that cover is near a food source, things can get interesting. What birds eat varies throughout the year, so if you are keen to develop your knowledge on where you might find birds, in addition to just finding and reading this information conveniently on the internet, you could investigate right at the source: the bird’s crop (provided you can shoot the first one). The crop is essentially an enlarged part of the esophagus, where food is stored and digestion is started. It generally sits right above the sternum, and, when full, can easily be felt. You can open it up by inserting a knife just at the top of the sternum, in the V where the breasts meet, and making a slit up towards the throat. Inside is a treasure of information what the birds are eating right now, where you are hunting. This information can help determining where you want to hunt next, or helps you focus on the right kind of cover or habitat.
For example, when we hunted sage grouse in September, the assumption was that they would be feeding on grasshoppers. So, we tried to focus on fields with lots of the jittery insects around. And we didn’t find sage grouse. After we killed the first birds, we found fresh greens and white berries in their crops. Since it had been scorching hot and bone dry, fresh greens could only be found near water. Ideally this story would continue by us hunting water courses and finding more birds, but that wasn’t the case. We found them later in the day, in mature sage brush, with not a green leaf in sight. But we might have, based on what we learned. Mid-to-late September ruffed grouse showed kinnikinnick berries and leaves predominantly,
information that went into the knowledge database for later.
In October, the focus was on sharptails, and they fed on insects (grasshoppers), wild rose hips and unidentified yellowish berries during the warm early weeks, and mostly rose hips towards the end of the season. An island of tall buck brush in the center and rose bushes around it had a good chance of holding some birds.
The one blue grouse I shot had nothing but unidentified green leaves in his crop, not very helpful.
In November, Hungarian partridge didn’t disappoint by confirming that they like to scrounge the stubbles for wheat kernels. But later in the day, they hid in the adjacent coulees to get out of the wind and hide from prying eyes.
The pheasants we shot had empty crops. According to a few biologists I asked, released pheasants don’t really manage to switch to eating wild foods, and the wild pheasants we shot, we found in the afternoon, when the morning feed had already left the crop. The latter is a bold non-scientific assumption, but could be true.
Perhaps checking the crop doesn’t provide immediately helpful information, but over the years, patterns might arise. Maybe some day that will come in handy.