By admin 
MINNEAPOLIS – The other day, I planned a hunting trip for the third week of October and thought briefly, then dismissed, the idea of booking a motel room.
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This would be for pheasants, or maybe I would divert for grouse and woodcock. Either way, the motel in question would be a dump, or what the kids call sketchy. I’d rather sleep with my dogs anyway, I thought, and if we stretched out in the truck, we’d be ready in the morning for whatever happens.
I was thinking about bird hunting because Minnesota’s early teal season began this weekend. Prospects were hot with a chance of mosquitoes.
In Marshall on Saturday, thermometers approached 90, hardly a temperature for targeting ducks that have barely fledged. Continentwide, blue-wings are down 11% from a year ago and 22% from their long-term average. Department of Natural Resources bigwigs say go for it. But I’ll wait for frost on the pumpkin, when blue-wings and other ducks arrow from the north fat and fully plumed, better for sport and better on the table.
How much game a deer hunter or wingshooter will lay up for the coming winter is a puzzler that consumes a lot of thinking beginning about Aug. 1.
The importance of this changes with age and experience. As a kid in North Dakota, I puffed up my chest a bit while flopping a limit of greenheads onto our backyard cleaning table. Whereas if I showed up with a lone gadwall, I did so with a shrug. These were my dad’s ducks, I was only the helper, and to him, one hunt was as good as another, limit or not, a lesson he taught by example. Either way, pinfeathers flying, beneath a bare lightbulb we plucked the birds while Boze, our big Lab, peered from the shadows, alert for scraps.
If you prefer eating game instead of store-bought meat, sharpening your aim is an early fall ritual. Whether with slugs, bullets or broadheads, you want to shoot tight groups. Otherwise you miss shots, the freezer echoes hauntingly, and soon you’re on a regret run to Cub for a side of beef and a case of Pop Tarts, the latter a bona fide mood enhancer.
Two autumns ago, I sat in a bow stand day after day without seeing anything within range. Then a good big buck ambled about 25 yards from me and I shot over him. In the same stand last year, I sat for four days. Finally, one snowy evening, I drew back on an OK buck, and amid gathering darkness I dragged him to my truck with his insides steaming. As with anything, when afield, persistence pays.
Hunters who this fall want the odds tipped in their favor might do best chasing pheasants. The DNR hasn’t released its 2026 roadside counts, but last year the state’s ringnecks were up about 50% compared to 2024. Gains this year won’t be as good, but North Dakota and Iowa’s pheasant reports this fall have been upbeat, and chances are Minnesota’s will follow suit.
Speaking of gamebirds, hunters remain concerned about ruffed grouse and why these cagey fowl no longer show up in autumn in numbers they should, based on spring drumming counts.
To foot-walking scattergunners who shoulder 20- or even 28-gauge shotguns, and who trail English setters or other canines quartering ahead, Ol’ Ruff is the King of Birds, and their downturn is deeply felt. West Nile, it’s widely believed, is the culprit, killing ruffed grouse young and old. Supporting this theory, other birds, especially crows, that readily fall victim to this disease also have gone missing.
One day some years back, beneath yellowed aspen leaves raining down on an Itasca County woodlot, I took an editor from the rival sheet across the river grouse and woodcock hunting.
Over my setter’s points he missed shot after shot before finally connecting on a woodcock, or timberdoodle as they’re more properly called.
On the way home, the fellow said that of the four years he had lived in Minnesota, this had been his best time ever. The remark, I thought, highlighted the physical and mental benefits of an autumn hike in the grouse woods.
“Better than a shrink,” I said. “And cheaper.”
The other day while channel surfing, I landed on a hunting show. Following what by now is a timeworn script, between commercials a trophy whitetail was spotted and waylaid, after which a tom turkey met the same fate.
Then, in both cases, the program’s featured marksman beamed into the camera while recounting in breathless detail the excitement of following a short blood trail to his quarry.
“There he is!”
And indeed, there they were, the deer and the turkey. Both face down.
Distilled in this way, only to the killing, the allure of hunting seems quite lost in translation.
I still remember more about my dad than I do about the ducks we cleaned together, more about the days I spent in a bow stand than the few seconds it took to loose a killing arrow, and more about the smile on a first-time hunter’s face than all the grouse and woodcock I’ve ever shot, or shot at.
Cool weather is part of it, the hunting experience. Also leaf colors, storms in the Arctic, migrating birds banking over fetid marshes and sleeping in trucks instead of motels, dogs by your side.
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And especially friends and family, those who are gone, and those still here.
How much game will hunters lay up for the coming winter?
It’s a puzzler, and they’re about the find out.
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This story was originally published September 9, 2026 at 2:42 AM.