Sharptails big in North Dakota

NEW TOWN, N.D. — Grasslands rolled to the horizon in every direction. The terrain climbed gently to meet the sky in the west and plunged sharply into a verdant valley to the east.

Across this vast panorama walked a hunter, his vest and cap glowing in the late September light. The hunter was Mark Helmer of Clover Valley. Ahead of him worked his black Lab, Boof, quartering deliberately across the grasses.

Helmer and I had driven 11 hours west from Duluth to see if we could scratch some sharp-tailed grouse and gray partridge from the expansive North Dakota landscape. We arrived at New Town, on the shores of Lake Sakakawea, about a week after the Sept. 12 opener. You don't want to wait too long on sharptails. The longer the season goes, the farther away they tend to flush.

Suddenly, Boof stopped moving. He raised one forepaw, and his head was cocked to the side. He was on point.

Helmer, 56, moved up close to Boof. In the next instant, the air was full of sharptails. Four or five of the big birds flushed ahead. Helmer touched off both barrels of his shotgun, and two grouse fell from the sky. Boof retrieved them both.

They were the first sharptails of the trip Helmer had taken. He had hunted the species casually before, if they happened to flush on pheasant hunts farther east. But this was the first time he had walked the prairies and the stubble fields and the tree rows of western North Dakota.

Now, he was ecstatic.

"Boof, you made my day. You made my trip. You may have made my whole year," Helmer said.

"I am hooked. I'll take this over pheasant hunting."

And Helmer loves his pheasant hunting.

But it's easy to see how a hunter with a good dog can fall in love with sharptail and gray partridge hunting on the North Dakota plains in September. It has several things going for it, and Helmer could see all of them clearly.

"I like the topography. I like the grasslands. You can watch your dog work," he said.

For those of us who spend most of the year in forests or marshes, the lure of open country and big skies is strong. More than once, we paused in our walks to watch Canada geese, snow geese or sandhill cranes riding a northwest wind across the sky.

The walking is effortless in calf-high grasses or golden stubble from cut durum wheat. Up on a rise, you can see almost into the next time zone.

"Boy, this is big country," Helmer would mutter from time to time.

And except for workers tending oil rigs, we were almost alone on the plains. We saw exactly two other hunters in three days of hunting, although we knew of two or three other groups from Minnesota who hunted in the same area.

"There are so few people," Helmer said. "So few hunters. And everyone is so friendly."

On several occasions, local farmers or oil rig workers stopped to visit and sometimes pointed out areas where we might find birds.

Helmer made a big swing through the grassland. He saw a thicket of silverberry, a tree-like shrub where sharptails and Huns often took shelter from the midday sun. When he was close enough, he sent in Boof.

Sharptails erupted from the tiny thicket in waves. The air was alive with wingbeats and the soft clucks that sharptails are known for. A good 35 or 40 birds must have gone out. The daily limit on sharptails is three, and after Helmer had dropped one bird, he quit shooting.

He was in bliss as Boof returned the bird to him. He looked it over, straightened its feathers and stowed it in his vest.

I knew just how he was feeling. I had limited on sharptails earlier, on the same piece of land. I had neglected to load my gun as we moved into the field, so when a covey of sharptails boiled from a thicket, they escaped unscathed. I was feeling pretty sheepish, but only my yellow Lab had witnessed the moment.

But in 20 minutes, the dog and I had rustled up three singles, and, with shells in my old 16-gauge, they all had ended up in my vest.

Each day after getting our limit of sharptails, we moved on to Hungarian partridge. The days were warm — up to 80 degrees — so our Hun hunts were typically short. We hunted them in abandoned farmsteads, working around shelterbelts, old barns and isolated brush patches.

But we had our best Hun hunting in isolated clumps of silverberry, a gray-green shrub. Often these thickets of silverberry grew around rock piles heaped at the edges of fields long ago by farmers. Ideally, those thickets were adjacent to fields of wheat or flax stubble.

The little birds would launch from those thickets 20 or 30 strong, peeping as they went. The challenge, as with any covey rise, was to focus on one bird at a time. Sometimes, we watched where the birds went and were able to get some of them up a second time.

By night, we camped on the shores of Lake Sakakawea, an impoundment of the Missouri River. Crickets sang in the grasses. Great horned owls hooted us to sleep. Coyotes yipped in the distance.

Living on this marvelous landscape, hunting its native birds, imbued in us a sense of timelessness.

Helmer seemed to put it best.

"I'd love to have seen this country the way Lewis and Clark saw it," he said.