Wild Apple Kennel: Brood Size

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Brood Size

It's been a somewhat disappointing summer for grouse. We've had plenty of grouse contacts but they've been a lot of single birds and relatively small broods with 3 to 4 chicks on the average with an occasional brood of five and one of seven. Today Peanut pointed and then took a couple steps and three quail size grouse got up. She chased them and then circled back to the spot and pointed again. I could see birds on the ground but they weren't in front of where she was pointing when she moved three more got up. She circled back and repeated the process twice more until she had put a total of 10 grouse chicks in the air. I'm pretty sure they were all from the same brood as they matched size-wise and most of young birds are close to full size now. She also had two woodcock contacts that she pointed briefly and would have given me shots at. Ruby had run just before her and pointed a woodcock and ran into at least two grouse that I heard go. So that was 3 woodcock and a dozen grouse for the puppies.

Lj had a pair of woodcock and a real nice relocation on a running grouse and I walked up a grouse. Lucy had a find on one of each and Pete backed Will and then had a grouse and a woodcock of his own. Frankie had a big morning as Tony wandered into a new part of the cover I ran Lucy in and found 13 grouse and a woodcock. Tony reported that the grouse were all feeding in the raspberries. That ran the count to close to 30 grouse. Tony and Bruce went of and moved some more grouse in another area to put our grouse count for the day somewhere around 35 birds. Ad that to the 16 or so woodcock we moved and you have a 50+ bird morning when it was in the high 50s at 6:00 am and was already in the mid 70s when I got back to the house with high humidity.

Front is supposed to come through this afternoon and evening to cool things back down. Frankie should probably get dog of the day but I didn't see him find all those grouse so I'm giving the nod to Peanut!!!