One Question Concerning The Glorious Twelfth Has Left Me Riddled

I first hunted ruffed grouse in 1979 on my in-laws’ gone-back farm in NY’s Adirondack region. On that hunt and every one since, birds in the bag were strictly coincidental; but thorn-raked “brush pants,” tattered game vests with pockets full of duff, and sore feet have always been companion parts of the mix. A hoary bromide has it that a successful grouse hunter seldom wears out his gun, but necessarily wears out many pairs of boots.

And then there are the trees. Spruce, popple, cedar, birch: their varieties are legion. They don't so much occupy grouse country as define it. To make matters worse, every grouse knows each tree by its first name. If my wife could whip up a good meal from all the branches and twigs I’ve shot, we could’ve opened a profitable restaurant.

Finally, a hunter doesn’t wobble off into the grouse woods to be attacked by the terrain and mocked by the birds unless he's following a trusty grouse dog who can roll its eyes at all the missed shots and, whenever possible, roll its shoulders into something dead, rotting and stinky.

I can hardly wait for October!

So I was as surprised as a snared stoat when I learned about Great Britain’s “Glorious Twelfth”, and the season of driven grouse shooting that it ushers in. It offers, as the saying goes, a study in contrasts. On August 12, bunches of wealthy “guns” – sportsmen – dress in short pants and, right out in the open, scattergun at red grouse from “butts.” Not on their butts, necessarily, but in little earthen fortifications. Maybe their grouse are fearsome? Anyways, near as I can tell, the shooters don’t have to take even a single step; in fact, because there’s some risk that an excitable gun standing in one butt might blast a fellow sportsman standing in another one nearby, I suspect that walking around is strictly limited.

Furthermore, each “gun” typically totes two shotguns. Well, the gunner doesn’t really tote them at all. He has a helper – the “loader” – who reloads one double barrel while the sportsman is engaged in emptying the other. That sounds a lot more comfy than bushwhacking through a December cedar swamp with snow sifting down your neck and Jack Frost nipping away hard at your nose and digital extremities. But it sure ain’t what my friends call partridge huntin’.

This “driven bird” thing just isn’t something I’d care to try. But, hey, some say poTAYto and some say poTAHto, eh? And, while it's not something I'm accustomed to, I have to admit that shooting at birds whizzing by at 70 or 80 miles an hour has got to be quite a challenge. I’ve got one question, though. With all those loaders just reloading away as fast as they can, and with all those fellows blazing away at the grouse being driven by, isn’t that just awful damn hard on the vehicles they're driving?