INTRODUCTION I’m often asked what animal I’d pursue if forbidden to chase all others. It’s a way people have of asking what my favorite game animal might be. My answer is, always, the grouse—which strikes some as a bit of a cop-out. Grouse, after all, is an entire clan of birds, occupying nearly every habitat in North America—sage grouse in the Great Basin, ptarmigan on the tundra, sooty grouse in the rain-soaked Pacific Northwest, sharpies on the Great Plains. To me, grouse are a microcosm of the spectacular diversity that makes the world of small game and upland birds so endlessly fascinating—diversity of place, diversity of flavor, diversity of animal, diversity of the people who pursue them. And grouse are just one example. There are seven different quail in North America, turkeys and pheasants live in most states, and rabbits and hares, from tiny desert cottontails to giant Arctic hares, are everywhere. Coastal marshes hold rails and snipe. Boggy inland alder thickets are home to the woodcock. The Great Plains are a game-bird hotspot, with Hungarian partridge, sharp-tailed grouse, prairie chickens, and pheasants, depending on where you go. Deserts are home to Gambel’s, scaled, and Mearns’ quail. Our mountains host blue grouse and mountain quail and all kinds of squirrels, and ptarmigan hide on mountain peaks, holed
up above the tree line in quasi-Arctic refugia. No matter where you go in this world, there’s some sort of small game. But you need not travel to the top of the Rockies to experience the world of small game. That’s the beauty of it—odds are there’s some sort of small game in your yard right now. The cute (and tasty) cottontail is a ubiquitous garden invader, the eastern gray squirrel now ranges as far as the West Coast, the turkey is fast becoming a regular part of the suburban scene (as many of us can attest), and doves and pigeons are everywhere (and I’m here to tell you that the common pigeon, also known as the rock dove, is fine table fare). These animals are many a young person’s entrée into the world of hunting. If you can hunt squirrels where they’re truly wild, you can hunt the deer that live among them. If you can sit still enough and quiet enough to coax a turkey close enough to shoot him, you can do the same in the deer blind. I experienced just such an initiation—with a squirrel in a Minnesota woodlot—at the tender age of thirty-two. So when I’m asked about my favorite small game and then pressed by someone in the know for something a bit more specific than “grouse,” I’ll admit to the grouse of my dreams: the ruffed, Bonasa umbellus. Ruffies occupy deciduous forests from Maine to 9