ALDEN TOWNSHIP, Minn. — In the woods northwest of Two Harbors, in a thicket of young aspen and alder, Bailey Petersen bent down to inspect a small patch of disturbed dirt.
"Another dusting bowl. And this one has a turd in it!" Petersen exclaimed. "And look, there's another grouse turd ... they are everywhere around here!"
Those little green chunks of feces were of course a good sign to grouse hunters looking for their creators. But they are especially interesting to Petersen, whose day job is wildlife biologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
Petersen, 35, gets excited over feathers she finds, the divots in dirt where ruffed grouse take their dust baths, the scat left behind by woodcock, called woodcock wash, and all manner of other flora and fauna in the woods. (She even found moose poop on this walk!)
Suddenly, Petersen's almost 4-year-old Llewellin setter, Hatchet, went on solid point, and the hunter quickly focused back to the game at hand.
"Easy boy," Petersen said in a hushed tone.
Just then a grouse rocketed out from a low branch in a balsam tree. It was there, and gone, in split seconds. Petersen never had a chance to shoot.
"I wasn't expecting that," she said.
No worries. It was one of 10 grouse that Hatchet would find and point and flush over two hours on this tax-forfeited forest land that's owned by the state of Minnesota and managed by St. Louis County.
Considering a ruffed grouse spends most of its short life within a half-mile range, this was a perfect place for a grouse to call home, Petersen noted. There were plenty of young aspen to provide food all year, birch trees to provide catkins for winter food, clover and strawberry on the trail and low-hanging spruce and balsam under which to keep warm and hide from predators in winter.
It's a mosaic of forest sizes, ages and species — not a sea of the same trees — some cut within the last five to 10 years, but also patches of older trees important for grouse habitat.
And now that the leaves are falling off the aspen and alder and birch in the woods, it's getting easier to see and shoot birds that do flush. The days are cooler now. The bugs are about gone. And woodcock should be migrating through soon for an added bonus in the woods.
This is the time of year grouse gurus dream about the other 11 months.
Petersen moves fast through the woods to keep up with Hatchet, starting on an old logging trail and then going wherever the dog gets birdy, sometimes into nearly impenetrable brush. Hatchet wears a GPS transmitter collar that allows Petersen (with a receiver hanging around her neck) to find him even in the thickest cover.
She communicates in a quiet voice and with hand signals, or a mellow mouth whistle, to bring Hatchet back to heel at any time.
This dog is a speed-demon on four legs, criss-crossing in front of Petersen, until he finds scent. Then he slows down and eventually stops on-point. Sometimes he even lays down, a trait bred into Llewellin setters for centuries, and waits for Petersen to catch up.
"He's 52 feet in there," Petersen said, pointing into a tangle of trees.
Good thing for GPS because neither one of us could see the mostly white dog because the cover was so thick. Indeed, when we got there, Hatchett was on point. This time the bird flushed a little too far out for a shot.
Then it was reconnoitering back to the trail and off, following Hatchet again.
"Llewellins are bred to work like this, to work fairly close and then basically hold on old scent until the hunter gets up close, and then move up," Petersen said. "The goal, if it works out, is that we both arrive at the bird at the same time, in the perfect scenario."
The next time Hatchet locked-up on point he was right on the trail. Petersen moved up, gun at the ready, and the grouse flushed straight away, across an opening in the trees. There would be no excuses here for a miss. The first shot from her .28 gauge side-by-side missed the mark, but Petersen's second shot connected, and Hatchet soon came back with a small grouse in his mouth.
Everyone was happy.
Hatchet and the hunters would later stumble into more grouse on or near the tail and, ever the curious biologist, Petersen wanted to find out why they were hanging out there. She later opened the crop of the dead bird and found it stuffed with the leaves from wild strawberry bushes that were growing in the open sunlight on the trail.
"That's why the grouse were there," Petersen noted.
Back on the truck tailgate, Petersen carefully plucked a rump feather from the grouse and determined it was a female (one spot instead of two on each rump feather). The small size and incomplete plumage meant it was a young bird, hatched this summer — maybe one of the lucky ones considering how cold and wet the spring was.
Petersen is the assistant wildlife manager for the DNR's Two Harbors wildlife division office. She spends much of her time working with state, county and federal foresters to design timber sales that will benefit wildlife in addition to benefiting loggers and the timber industry.
Petersen also conducts wildlife surveys (one of her favorites is the spring spruce grouse survey that involves, you guessed it, counting turds) to keep track of furbearers, birds and even small mammals like mice.
Her career has her afield often, and that allows her to find where across Northeastern Minnesota the best grouse and woodcock cover is growing. She keeps note of the best coverts and comes back with Hatchet, her other Llewellin, Riffle (Hatchet's son), or her small Munsterlander, Mogul, in the fall.
"I love this so much I'll bring them back without a gun, after the season," Petersen noted. From May to July, hunting dogs aren't allowed in the woods as critters raise their young, "so we do a lot of swimming then."
Petersen grew up in the Twin Cities but graduated from high school in the Brainerd area. She attended college at Bemidji State University, where she really got into hunting with her future husband, A.J. Petersen. The couple got their first hunting dog in 2012, a golden retriever, and shot their first ruffed grouse while on a pheasant hunting trip near Long Prairie, Minnesota.
"We've become huge grouse people now," said Bailey, a member of the Ruffed Grouse Society.
The couple, who met while both working in high school at a ski hill in Nisswa, Minnesota, grew to become hunters as they dated.
"Neither of us hunted much growing up. Very occasionally deer hunting with our dads," Bailey said. "We picked it up together and, as his love for fishing grew, my love for the dog work and grouse also grew."
A.J. is now the environmental manager for the Minnesota Air National Guard's 148th Fighter Wing base in Duluth.
Now, A.J. and Bailey hunt together across the country. While she does enjoy waterfowl hunting and hunting other game birds — in recent seasons the Petersens have hunted sharp-tailed, blue and sage grouse in western states and woodcock and grouse in Michigan — Petersen said she is blessed to live in one of the best ruffed grouse regions in the country.
The dogs and the birds have become her passion in life. She hunts upward of 50 days each autumn.
"It's the dogs. I just can't get enough of working with these dogs," she said while offering Hatchet a squirt from a water bottle on a break from our warm afternoon hunt. "This time of year, when the leaves are down and the woodcock get going, I try to get one dog out every afternoon."
One of her first wildlife jobs out of college was surveying woodcock in central Minnesota, and Petersen became fascinated with the little migratory game bird often considered a secondary quarry during grouse hunts. She combines her love of woodcock, sometimes called timberdoodles, with her love of dog training — using her dogs to find clutches of newly hatched woodcock chicks in the spring so the birds can be banded to monitor the population.
It takes delicate, intricate work with extremely well-trained and well-behaved dogs that must pass strict tests before being allowed to participate. And that's exactly why Petersen likes to do it.
"It lets me keep working with my dogs all year, and I love that," she noted. "Plus we're helping out, giving back."
The Llewellin setter (pronounced LOO-well-in) may be one with the most debated pedigrees in the world of hunting dogs. With a long line of English setter cousins, Llewellins have been around for hundreds of years and has been loved by many upland hunters. These are driven working dogs that can chase birds all day long.
To understand the relationship between English and LLewellin setters, note that all Llewellins are indeed English setters, but not all English setters are Llewellins.
Two hundred years ago in the 1820s, Edward Laverack began a breeding program to define the setter breed with long, elegant lines and a flowing coat that led to the beginnings of the English settlers known today. Shortly after Laverak's efforts, Richard L. P. Llewellin bred into Laverack's dogs the earliest beginnings of the Llewellin-type setter more known for hunting traits than their appearance.
The debate continues on whether today's Llewellins are truly ancestors of the original Richard Llewellin's dogs, their own breed, or just a different line of English setters. But for many hunters who handle Llewellins, don't try to tell them they are the same thing.
Llewellins average 20-26 inches tall, with males running 45-65 pounds and females 35-50 pounds.
